Absolute Wavefront Measurements Of High Energy Laser Beams In The Beamlet Demonstration Project For The National Ignition Facility PDF Download

In the second half of the 1990's, LLNL and others anticipate designing and beginning construction of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The NIF will be capable of producing the worlds first laboratory scale fusion ignition and bum reaction by imploding a small target. The NIF will utilize approximately 192 simultaneous laser beams for this purpose. The laser will be capable of producing a shaped energy pulse of at least 1.8 million joules (MJ) with peak power of at least 500 trillion watts (TV). In total, the facility will require more than 7,000 large optical components. The performance of a high power laser of this kind can be seriously degraded by the presence of low amplitude, periodic modulations in the surface and transmitted wavefronts of the optics used. At high peak power, these phase modulations can convert into large intensity modulations by non-linear optical processes. This in turn can lead to loss in energy on target via many well known mechanisms. In some cases laser damage to the optics downstream of the source of the phase modulation can occur. The database described here contains wavefront phase maps of early prototype optical components for the NIF. It has only recently become possible to map the wavefront of these large aperture components with high spatial resolution. Modem large aperture static fringe and phase shifting interferometers equipped with large area solid state detectors have made this possible. In a series of measurements with these instruments, wide spatial bandwidth can be detected in the wavefront.