The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a 192 beam Nd-glass laser facility presently under construction at LLNL. When completed, NIF will produce 1.8 MJ, 500 TW of ultraviolet light making it the world's largest and most powerful laser system. NIF will be the world's preeminent facility for performing experiments for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and High Energy Density Science (HEDS). The Project, begun in 1995, is over 80% complete. The building and the beam path are essentially complete. Nearly all of the functionality of the laser subsystems has been demonstrated. NIF has demonstrated on a single beam basis that it meets its performance goals and shown the laser's precision and flexibility for pulse shaping, pointing, and timing. Beam conditioning techniques, important for target performance, were also demonstrated. The focal spot can be tailored to user specifications using phase plates. Temporal smoothing using smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD) as well as polarization smoothing was demonstrated. The remaining work is mostly to complete the optics and install them in the beam path and complete the utilities. Presently, eight beams have been activated through the amplifiers and spatial filters to the switchyard wall. Over 150 kJ of 1ω light has been produced with just 4% of the NIF capacity activated. The Project is scheduled for completion in 2009 and plans have been developed to begin ignition experiments in 2010. This talk will provide NIF status, the plan to complete NIF, and the path to ignition.
The construction of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) building and laser beampaths at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory has been completed. This 8-year design/construction effort has successfully erected a 450,000 sq ft
building and filled its interior with a complex of large-scale optical benches. These benches support all of the largeaperture
optic elements of the NIF and the environmentally controlled enclosures that protect each of the 192 laser
beamlines as they propagate from the injection laser system, through large aperture amplification stages, and into the
target chamber. Even though this facility is very large, nearly 200 m long, 100 m wide, and 30 m tall, stringent
mechanical performance requirements have been achieved throughout including temperature control <0.3°C, laserbeam
pointing stability on target <50 μrms, and level 100 surface cleanliness on internal components. This presentation
will provide an historical perspective explaining the basis of the design, technical details describing the techniques of
construction and a chronological progression of the construction activities from ground breaking to beampath
completion.
Nodular defects in multilayer dielectric coatings have been computer modeled to characterize the electromechanical responses to laser pulses with wavelengths of 1.06 micrometers and pulse lengths between 1 and 20 ns. The simulation begins with an axisymmetric electric field model using AMOS, a full-wave Maxwell solver with lossy (dispersive) electric and magnetic material models. Electric fields calculated by this code determine the spatial distribution of absorbed laser energy in the vicinity of the nodule. This data is linked to a thermal/stress model and mechanical calculations are executed using the general purpose finite element code COSMOS/M. The simulation estimates the transient temperature response of the nodule and the surrounding medium and predicts the dynamic stresses caused by the thermal impulse. This integrated computer process has been exercised to characterize failure of nodules as a function of defect characteristics, including seed size and depth.
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