Relativistic and nonrelativistic modulational instability of a laser radiation in an unmagnetized laser-produced plasma: Kinetic theory

Summary This paper presents a rigorous theoretical investigation of the relativistic and nonrelativistic modulational instability of a high-power laser radiation propagating in a collisionless and unmagnetized laser-produced plasma. The kinetic equationviz. the relativistic Vlasov equation has been employed to find the nonlinear response of electrons for this four-wave parametric process in the plasma. The actual motivation behind this theoretical investigation is to find the relativistic effect on this four-wave paremetric processviz. the modulational instability. Here, it can be noted that the modulational instability of the laser radiation under our situation has not a large but considerable relativistic effect and for the same set of plasma parameters the growth rate of the instability in ultrarelativistic consideration is approximately three times higher than that in the nonrelativistic consideration. The authors of this paper have agreed to not rective the proofs for correction.