This paper reviews work on flashlamp-pumped solid state lasers and discusses diode-pumped solid state lasers, the Mercury laser in particular. It also discusses ICF lasers beyond Mercury.

/pdf/diode-pumped-solid-state-laser-drivers-for-inertial-fusion-2mdsvqa1zu.pdf

Diode-pumped solid-state laser drivers for inertial fusion energy

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), currently under construction at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a stadium-sized facility containing a 192-beam, 1.8-MJ, 500-TW, 351-nm laser system and a 10-m-diam target chamber with room for nearly 100 experimental diagnostics. NIF is being built by the National Nuclear Security Administration and when completed will be the world’s largest laser experimental system, providing a national center to study inertial confinement fusion and the physics of matter at extreme energy densities and pressures. NIF will provide 192 energetic laser beams that will compress small fusion targets to conditions where they will ignite and burn, liberating more energy than is required to initiate the fusion reactions. NIF experiments will allow the study of physical processes at temperatures approaching 100 million K and 100 billion times atmospheric pressure. These conditions exist naturally only in the interior of stars and in nuclear weapons explosions. In the course of designing the world’s most energetic laser system, a number of significant technology breakthroughs have been achieved. Research is also underway to develop a shorter pulse capability on NIF for very high power and extreme electromagnetic field research and applications. We discuss here the technology challenges and solutions that have made NIF possible, along with enhancements to NIF’s design that could lead to near-exawatt power levels.

The National Ignition Facility Status and Plans for Laser Fusion and High Energy Density Experimental Studies

One of the biggest challenges the HiPER project is facing is to identify a laser architecture that meets all the demanding requirements Among those are high wall-plug efficiency (15 to 20%) and repetition rate (5 to 10 Hz) In order to perform this task, four teams from the co-authors' institutions are working together and exploring several approaches described here

Multi kJ level Laser Concepts for HiPER Facility

We propose a novel method to minimize laser–plasma instabilities and improve laser–plasma coupling by the use of multi-beam laser architecture with a large system frequency bandwidth and many beamlets per unit solid angle. The StarDriver™, laser driver is constructed from 104 to 105 individual lasers, each delivering nominally 100 J in pulses of ~3–30 ns at a nominal wavelength of ~355 nm with better than 3–5 diffraction-limited performance. The beamlets are individually relatively narrowband to facilitate maximum laser performance, but the ensemble of beamlets span a wide frequency range. Currently available laser media enable Δω/ω ~ 2 % at 355 nm with the possibility of system bandwidths approaching 10 % in the future. The many beamlets of StarDriver™ provide optimal asymptotic smoothing for hydrodynamic instabilities (0–1 %), innovative focusing strategies including zooming, and the large bandwidth enables extremely rapid hydrodynamic smoothing times ~30 fs. The distribution of frequencies among the beamlets allows flexibility for fine control of the seeding of the Rayleigh–Taylor instability. The ultra-broad bandwidth combined with the large total k-spectrum of the laser drive in the plasma corona may enable complete suppression of the most problematic laser–plasma instabilities such as stimulated Brillouin backscatter, stimulated Raman scatter, cross-beam energy transfer, and the two plasmon decay instability. StarDriver™ offers potentially superior flexibility in laser drivers for inertial confinement fusion, enabling almost arbitrary sequencing of wavelength, polarization, focus, and fine control of the spatio-temporal properties of the drive in the corona. The highly modular strategy of StarDriver™ should enable an attractive development pathway as well as maximizing overall system efficiency.

StarDriver: A Flexible Laser Driver for Inertial Confinement Fusion and High Energy Density Physics

Generation of nanosecond pulses with 55-mJ energy and 4.8-MW peak power are demonstrated in a multistage fiber amplifier system, which is seeded with 10-nm broadband pulses from a superluminescence diode. The pulses are at low repetition of 10 Hz and with width of 10 ns. High energy and high peak power for nanosecond pulses are obtained simultaneously from fiber amplifier. In particular, the peak power is at least two times the previous peak power for nanosecond pulses.

High Energy and High Peak Power Nanosecond Pulses Generated by Fiber Amplifier

On the feasibility of a fiber-based inertial fusion laser driver

This paper presents a new amplifying laser concept designed to produce high energy in either short or long pulses using coherent or incoherent addition of few millions fibers. These are called respectively CAN for Coherent Amplification Network and FAN for Fiber Amplification Network. The fibers would be large core or Large Mode Area (LMA) which have demonstrated up to 10, mJ output energy per fiber1. Such a system could meet the driver criteria of Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) power plants based on Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), in particular high efficiency and high repetition rate.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/112/3/032052/pdf

New amplifying laser concept for inertial fusion driver

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On the feasibility of a fiber-based inertial fusion laser driver

New amplifying laser concept for inertial fusion driver