  The study of parametric instabilities has played a crucial role in
understanding energy transfer to plasma and, with that, the development of key
applications such as inertial confinement fusion. When the densities are
between $0.108n_c\lesssim n_e\lesssim 0.138n_c$ and the electron temperature is
$T_e=$2.5 keV, anomalous hot electrons with kinetic energies above 100 keV are
generated. Here, a new electron acceleration mechanism - the anti-Stokes
Langmuir decay instability cascade of forward stimulated Raman scattering - is
investigated. This mechanism not only explains anomalous energetic electron
generation in indirectly driven inertial confinement fusion experiments (and,
with that, future mitigation strategies for experiments on the National
Ignition Facility), it also provides a new way of accelerating electrons to
higher energy for applications such as novel X-ray sources.
