Interstellar Medium & 0.92c ?

Just finished reading the book again & watched the movie again a couple of weeks back, something has me puzzled (for which I may have a solution**).

When a ship like the Hail Mary is travelling at a high relativistic velocity (say 0.92c) what happens if it hits something? Specifically not stray cosmic rays or single particles but grains of dust from the interstellar medium, which apparently from our current understanding over a 10Ly journey could amount upwards of 12mg in particle sizes from nanometres to perhaps one or two at 10 micrometers following an inverse 5/3 power law in quantity vs size.

That mass & size might not sound much of an issue but over the 10Ly journey to Tau-Ceti this could erode 0.8 meters off a Tungsten shield the diameter of the front of the ship which is about 194 Tonnes of material.

There appears to be no mention of such shielding in the book or movie, in fact in the book the front of the ship is where the beetles are stored & the plating there could be removed by one guy in a spacesuit.

Also, we cannot rely on the Astrophage radiation shielding to protect use as such particles would punch right though normal hull thicknesses leaving perhaps needle thin holes, but certainly causing radiation damage to the materials.

Admittedly this is only a problem during the acceleration & coast phase of any relativistic journey, during the deceleration phase because the spin drive is facing forward anything in the way of the ship is instantly vaporised & expelled, ** Which is where the idea I just had comes from.

Assuming we already have 16-32 manoeuvring mini-spin-drives all over the ship, what if there is one cluster pointed directly forward. If such a device could generate perhaps 100-200Mw of IR light (easy for this technology) then it could vaporise such particles up to 10 micrometers in size at a distance of more than 100m ahead of the ship.

After which there either needs to be a perhaps less substantial frontal shield or a magnetic deflection field of possibly 5T. But if the power was increased somewhat the field might not be needed.

BTW such an emission out the front of the ship would only result in a velocity change of around 300m/s over the 10Ly.

Anyways, that is my shower thought for today.