Abstract

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is currently under design by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other Department of Energy laboratories. It is a 192-beam frequency-converted Nd:glass laser with 1.8 mJ of output energy at 351 nm. The goal for this system is to achieve ignition for a D–T fusion capsule in the laboratory. The laser front-end is designed to inject as much as 9 J in a beam precisely controlled for temporal pulse shape, spatial intensity profile, and beam bandwidth. The NIF front-end consists of a fiber based oscillator system, phase modulators, fiber amplification and distribution, amplitude modulation, a regenerative amplifier, and a 2.5-cm-square-aperture four-pass amplifier.

© 1995 Optical Society of America