Analysis of Azimuthal Doppler Shift of Anisotropically Absorbed Laguerre-Gaussian Beam Propagating in Transverse Flow

The particle flux onto a material is an important parameter in the study of the plasma-material interaction. With conventional Doppler spectroscopy, it is difficult to measure the flow velocity perpendicular to the material because only the velocity component projected on the wave number vector can be measured. To overcome the limitation, we are developing a transverse flow measurement method using the azimuthal Doppler shift of a Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beam absorption spectroscopy. In this paper, the feasibility of this spectroscopy method has been examined by numerical analysis. The LG beam is anisotropically absorbed in the transverse flow due to the azimuthal Doppler shift. Since the anisotropic LG beam rotates with propagation, the spatial structure of resonance absorption in plasma and the intensity structure of the LG beam that has propagated through the plasma are inevitably different in the LG beam absorption spectroscopy. It was shown that the deviation from the original azimuthal Doppler shift is reduced to several percent at the position where the intensity distribution of the LG beam reaches its maximum value. Therefore, the transverse flow can be measured with sufficient accuracy by properly selecting the position on the beam cross-section used to evaluate the azimuthal Doppler shift.