Final Technical Report 'Study of Efficiency of Raman Backscattering Amplification in Plasma'

General : Our major scientific achievements in Raman Backscattering (RBS) amplification and compression of short laser pulses in plasma. The laser system based on RBS steps in where the current technology of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) (extremely successful in developing ultra-short and ultra-intense laser pulses in last 2 decades) becomes difficult and very expensive to apply. Good base for such RBS laser was created by our recent experiments, which were supported by GPS grants. The main objective of the present grant was: improvement efficiency of energy transfer from pump to seed. The results surpassed our expectations; we improved the efficiency of energy transfer from pump to seed by a factor of 6 compared to the best of our previous results and amplified seed pulse compressed down to about 50 fsec.