Three-dimensional optical trajectory tracing and energy deposition of a laser beam in a laser-driven fusion - art. no. 036703

A convenient method of three-dimensional ray tracing is suggested in the ge ometrical optical approximation, in which the laser ray propagation is comp letely based on the concept of optical trajectory tracing rather than depen ding upon the effective force and propagation time. This tracing has two ob vious advantages that the direct application of Snell's law can be avoided when a ray crosses a different density zone and that to any desired accurac y it takes much less computation time than existing tracing. For Gaussian l ight beam propagation, in a spherically symmetric plasma atmosphere, the re sults emphasize that the deposition uniformity is strongly dependent not on ly on the wavelength of the laser but also on the temperature of the plasma .