Revisiting non-local heat transport in laser produced plasma

The understanding and the control of high-power laser propagation into underdense plasma is important to achieve inertial confinement fusion. During this process, the interaction of the laser with the plasma filling the hohlraum can lead to significant loss of laser energy which prevent ignition. Self-focusing or filamentation of the laser light is one of these phenomena which are desired to be mitigated since it also affects the uniformity of the laser illumination on the hohlraum wall. It has been recently shown [1] that (1) a proper treatment of heat transport in hydrodynamic codes is crucial to model filamentation, especially in the case of high temperature gradients where heat transport exhibits non-local behavior, and (2) filamentation can occur even if the plasma conditions are below the commonly envisioned instability threshold.