Suppression of the Laser Hosing Instability in a Parabolic Plasma Channel
Abstract
We present an analytical stability analysis of the laser hosing instability in a parabolic channel in the weakly relativistic regime. We employ a variational principle approach to derive a set of coupled equations describing laser dynamics in a transversely inhomogeneous plasma. The quadratic Lagrangian formalism is applied to perform a stability analysis and to derive the growth rates for hosing in both long- and short-wavelength regimes. We find that a parabolic channel suppresses the long-wavelength hosing mode completely, for any channel depth, and that the unstable band of the short-wavelength mode is bounded below by a cutoff wavenumber set by the ratio of the channel frequency to the hosing coupling. A steeper channel narrows the unstable band and lowers the short-wavelength growth rate, but cannot stabilize the mode, since the dispersion relation forbids damping identically. The analysis is accompanied by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, which reproduce the prediction in the nonlinear regime: the long-wavelength mode is absent in a channel, the surviving modulation shortens as the channel steepens, and its amplitude falls with channel depth. Further, our simulation results demonstrate the sensitivity of off-axis laser propagation to the plasma channel and distinguish the hosing instability from laser oscillations due to off-axis laser propagation in a plasma channel.
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BibTeX
@misc{jogiya2026suppression,
title = {{Suppression of the Laser Hosing Instability in a Parabolic Plasma Channel}},
author = {Yash M Jogiya and Vishwa Bandhu Pathak},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.07475},
eprint = {2611.07475},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07475},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Suppression of the Laser Hosing Instability in a Parabolic Plasma Channel
AU - Yash M Jogiya
AU - Vishwa Bandhu Pathak
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.07475
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07475
AB - We present an analytical stability analysis of the laser hosing instability in a parabolic channel in the weakly relativistic regime. We employ a variational principle approach to derive a set of coupled equations describing laser dynamics in a transversely inhomogeneous plasma. The quadratic Lagrangian formalism is applied to perform a stability analysis and to derive the growth rates for hosing in both long- and short-wavelength regimes. We find that a parabolic channel suppresses the long-wavelength hosing mode completely, for any channel depth, and that the unstable band of the short-wavelength mode is bounded below by a cutoff wavenumber set by the ratio of the channel frequency to the hosing coupling. A steeper channel narrows the unstable band and lowers the short-wavelength growth rate, but cannot stabilize the mode, since the dispersion relation forbids damping identically. The analysis is accompanied by two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, which reproduce the prediction in the nonlinear regime: the long-wavelength mode is absent in a channel, the surviving modulation shortens as the channel steepens, and its amplitude falls with channel depth. Further, our simulation results demonstrate the sensitivity of off-axis laser propagation to the plasma channel and distinguish the hosing instability from laser oscillations due to off-axis laser propagation in a plasma channel.
ER -