Article Abstracts | June 2006
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Innovative Technology Enables a New Architecture for the World’s Largest Laser
To achieve temperatures and pressures similar to those at the center of the sun, the National Ignition Facility will employ a new optical switch technology -- the plasma-electrode Pockels cell.
by Camille Bibeau, Mark A. Rhodes and L. Jeffrey Atherton, Lawrence Livermore National
The world’s largest laser, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., is 85 percent complete (Figure 1). When operational, its 192 ultraviolet beams will converge on a target filled with frozen hydrogen, enabling scientists to observe the behavior of materials at temperatures and pressures never before achieved and to study the physics of inertial-confinement fusion.
Generating the 1.8 MJ of laser energy needed to produce conditions similar to the center of the sun required that NIF deviate from the traditional, single-pass amplifier layout in which a beam passes only once through each consecutive amplifier stage and, consequently, that many new technologies be developed.1 ...
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