Filamentation and stimulated Brillouin scattering in a turbulent plasma

This paper presents a theory of filamentation and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) of high-frequency electromagnetic radiation in a weakly collisional plasma with ion-acoustic turbulence. When the square of the wavelength of the plasma perturbations is less than the product of the two mean free path lengths of an electron with respect to its collisions with turbulent fluctuations and with electrons, the influence of cold highly collisional electrons on the parametric instabilities becomes apparent. It is shown that the plasma turbulence lowers the filamentation threshold, and the SBS threshold can be either lowered or raised. The dependence of the SBS and filamentation thresholds on the electron mean free path length in the turbulent plasma and on the anisotropy of the plasma turbulence is determined. The corresponding dependence of the spatial scale of the most efficiently growing filaments and their spatial growth rate are found. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.