LASER FUSION EXPERIMENTS AT 2 TW

Section 2 PROGRESS IN LASER FUSION 2.A Initial Long-Pulse Experiments on OMEGA

Investigation of fusion yield from exploding deuterium-cluster plasmas produced by 100-TW laser pulses

When clusters of deuterium are irradiated with an intense, ultrafast laser pulse, the clusters explode, generating ions with kinetic energies high enough to produce nuclear-fusion events. Here we present experimental measurements of the dependence of the fusion yield of an exploding deuterium-cluster plasma on pulse energy up to the 10-J level for incident pulse durations of 100 fs and 1 ps. Th...

Detection of Hohlraum Target Position for Laser Fusion Experiments

A hohlraum is a cylindrical structure that holds a laser fusion target at the National Ignition Facility. It must be aligned properly for all the 192 laser beams to hit the target and cause a fusion reaction. Video images of the hohlraum are used to align the hohlraum to the required position. A matched filtering based approach is used to locate the circular alignment fiducial of the hohlraum. ...

Irradiation Uniformity for High-Compression Laser-Fusion Experiments

12 LLE Review, Volume 77 Various techniques are being used to achieve the high irradiation uniformity required for direct-drive, laser-fusion experiments on the OMEGA laser system. These techniques are directly applicable to the National Ignition Facility (NIF) being built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The combination of two-dimensional smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD),1–...

Experiments in Vision-Laser Fusion Using the Bayesian Occupancy Filter

Occupancy Grids have been used to represent the environment for some time. More recently, the Bayesian Occupancy Filter (BOF), which provides both an estimate of likelihood of occupancy of each cell, AND a probabilistic estimate of the velocity of each cell in the grid, has been introduced and patented. This work presents the first experiments in the use of the BOF to fuse data obtained from st...