Production of picosecond, kilojoule, petawatt laser pulses via Raman amplification of nanosecond pulses

Raman amplification in plasma has been promoted as a means of compressing picosecond optical laser pulses to femtosecond duration to explore the intensity frontier. Here we show for the first time that it can be used, with equal success, to compress laser pulses from nanosecond to picosecond duration. Simulations show up to 60% energy transfer from pump to probe pulses, implying that multi-kiloJoule ultra-violet petawatt laser pulses can be produced using this scheme. This has important consequences for the demonstration of fast-ignition inertial confinement fusion.