Review of upconverted Nd-glass laser plasma experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Systematic scaling experiments aimed at deducing the dependence of laser-plasma interaction phenomena on target plasma material and target irradiation history have been underway in laboratories all over the world in recent years. During 1980 and 1981 the Livermore program undertook to measure the laser light absorption of high and low Z plasmas and the partition of the absorbed energy amongst the thermal and suprathermal electron populations as a function of both laser intensity and wavelength. Simulations suggested that short wavelength laser light would couple more efficiently than longer wavelengths to target plasmas. Shorter wavelength heating of higher electron plasma densities would, it was felt, lead to laser-plasma interactions freer of anomalous absorption processes. The following sections review LLNL experiments designed to test these hypotheses

Novette facility: activation and preliminary experimental results

The construction and performance of the Novette Laser/Target interaction system are described

Recent progress in inertial confinement fusion at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

The Shiva and Argus laser systems at Livermore have been developed to study the physics of inertial confinement fusion. Both laser system designs are predicated on the use of large aperture Nd-glass disk amplifiers and high power spatial filters. During the past year we have irradiated DT filled microshell targets with and without polymer coatings. Recently new instruments have been developed to investigate implosion dynamics and to determine the maximum fuel density achieved by these imploded fusion pellets. A series of target irradiations with thin wall microshells at 15 to 20 TW, exploding pusher designs, resulted in a maximum neutron yield of 3 x 10/sup 10/. Polymer coated microshells designed for high compression were subjected to 4 kJ for 0.2 ns and reached fuel densities of 2.0 to 3.0 gm/cm/sup 3/. Results of these and other recent experiments will be reviewed

Toward high brightness, multi-kilowatt solid state lasers

High average power (HAP) solid state laser output with improved beam quality has introduced new capabilities in materials processing. At the 500 W level and with a beam quality of a few'' times the diffraction limit, the General Electric NY slab is able to drill 5 cm of stainless steel in a few seconds. We expect that 2--3 kW of near infrared laser output in a low order spatial mode would enable metal working now unknown to industry. The HAP output of slab lasers is limited by the size of the available laser crystals and the pump power. Core free, six cm diameter NY boules have been grown on an experimental basis. High optical quality NG can be obtained up to 10 cm in diameter. We present the results of our modeling based on these crystals pumped by advanced arc-lamps or laser diode arrays. We project HAP laser outputs of 1.6 kW from an existing Vortek pumped NG oscillator and about 2 kW from diode pumped NY device. Several kW of laser output can be expected from two such slabs in a MOPA configuration before optical damage limits are reached. The three dimensional stress-optic code which we used to optimize our designs, was normalized to available experimental data obtained with the above NG slab at the 500 W level and a 40 W diode pumped NY test bed. Our calculations indicate the essential parameters for attainment of high beam quality. Cooling uniformity across the pumped faces of the slab is critical and the location of the transition between pumped and un-pumped regions towards the slab tips is very important. A flat pumping profile was found to be desirable and predicted one wave of distortion which should be correctable over about 75% of the aperture however, an even better wavefront was predicted over 90% of the aperture when the regions near the edges of the slab were slightly over-pumped relative to the central regions and the regions near to the ends were tapered to compensate for transition effects

Modeling of filamentation damage induced in silica by 351-nm laser pulses

A major risk factor that must be considered in design of the National Ignition Facility is the possibility for catastrophic self-focusing of the 351-nm beam in the silica optical components that are in the final section of the laser. Proposed designs for the laser are analyzed by the beam-propagation code PROP92. A 351-nm self-focusing experiment, induction of tracking damage, was done to provide data for validation of this code. The measured self-focusing lengths were correctly predicted by the code

Experiments with polymer coated microspheres irradiated by the Shiva laser system

Polymer coated spherical targets have been irradiated by the Shiva laser system in an effort to compress the contained 10 mg/cc DT fuel to super liquid densities. Glass microspheres of 140 ..mu..m ID and 5 ..mu..m wall thickness with polymer coatings 15 ..mu..m to 100 ..mu..m thick have been irradiated with laser pulses of 4 kilojoules in 200 psec FWHM. Target performance was diagnosed with neutron yield measurements, radiochemistry, Argon line imaging, and x-ray imaging techniques. Ball in plate targets achieved greater implosion symmetry than free-standing ball targets. With yields of 10/sup 7/ to 10/sup 8/ neutrons, targets reached DT fuel compressions of several times liquid density

Engineering the National Ignition Facility

The engineering team of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has developed a highly optimized hardware design that satisfies stringent cost, performance and schedule requirements. After a 3-year effort, the design will culminate at the end of FY98 with the completion of major Title II design reviews. Every element of the facility from optic configuration, facility layout and hardware specifications to material selection, fabrication techniques and part tolerancing has been examined to assure the minimum cost per joule of laser energy delivered on target. In this paper, the design of the major subsystems will be discussed from the perspective of this optimization emphasis. Focus will be placed on the special equipment hardware which includes laser, beam transport, opto-mechanical , system control and target area systems. Some of the unique features in each of these areas will be discussed to highlight how significant cost savings have been achieved while maintaining reasonable and acceptable performance risk. Key to the success has also been a vigorous development program that commenced nearly 4 years ago and has been highly responsive to the specific needs of the NIF project. Supporting analyses and prototyping work that evolved from these parallel activities will also be discussed

Shiva target alignment and viewing instrument

To view and align Shiva laser targets, two new telemicroscopic instruments integral with TV camera and HeNe laser illuminator have been designed. The common requirement of both instruments is the capability of imaging two objects of different sizes on a TV screen: the large surrogate target (5 mm diameter) and the laser fusion target (0.250 mm diameter) with the same resolution (better than 7 ..mu..m). Both instruments have an optical relay which images the targets on a fixed reference reticle; the object is to center each target on the reticle. One of the instruments reimages the reticle plane onto the TV dectector using a zoom arrangement. This instrument translates the TV camera-zoom assembly in three axes and is thereby capable of exploring an object-space volume of 1 cm/sup 3/. In the other instrument, the reticle plane is reimaged by a zoom lens and this enlarged image is relayed to the TV detector by a cluster of five lenses. Four lateral lenses image the periphery of the surrogate target and the reticle for coincidence. The central objective images the center of the reticle and the fusion target when it is centered

The Expectation Monad in Quantum Foundations

The expectation monad is introduced abstractly via two composable adjunctions, but concretely captures measures. It turns out to sit in between known monads: on the one hand the distribution and ultrafilter monad, and on the other hand the continuation monad. This expectation monad is used in two probabilistic analogues of fundamental results of Manes and Gelfand for the ultrafilter monad: algebras of the expectation monad are convex compact Hausdorff spaces, and are dually equivalent to so-called Banach effect algebras. These structures capture states and effects in quantum foundations, and also the duality between them. Moreover, the approach leads to a new re-formulation of Gleason's theorem, expressing that effects on a Hilbert space are free effect modules on projections, obtained via tensoring with the unit interval.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2011, arXiv:1210.029

Nambu-Goldstone Fields, Anomalies and WZ Terms

We construct the Wess-Zumino terms from anomalies in case of quasigroups for the following situations. One is effective gauge field theories of Nambu-Goldstone fields associated with spontaneously broken global symmetries and the other is anomalous gauge theories. The formalism that we will develop can be seen as a generalization of the non-linear realization method of Lie groups. As an example we consider 2d gravity with a Weyl invariant regularizationComment: 19 pages, Late