Robustness of laser phase fronts in backward Raman amplifiers

The backward Raman amplification (BRA) of short laser pulses in plasma is studied numerically in two space dimensions. A high quality prefocused seed pulse is shown to remain well-focused through the entire process of the seed amplification by a high quality pump. In addition, it is shown that the BRA is not sensitive to a broad class of pump and seed fluctuations. The BRA length at which self-focusing and self-phase-modulation effects appear is determined numerically.