Abstract
High-gain laser fusion requires a nearly uniform ablation pressure at the pellet surface. For the case of directly illuminated pellets, this in turn requires a high degree of uniformity in the laser irradiance. Even with lateral smoothing in the ablating plasma, illumination uniformities of the order of ±10% are likely to be required. With short-wavelength lasers, where there is minimal lateral smoothing in the blowoff plasma, uniformities of ± 1 % may be required. Efforts to achieve uniform illumination have been frustrated by imperfections in the Incident high-power laser beam. We report here a simple and novel technique that allows high-target illumination uniformity with modest quality laser beams.1
© 1983 Optical Society of America
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