The National ignition facility: Status and performance of the world’s largest laser system for the high energy density and inertial confinement fusion

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been designed to support a wide variety of high energy density science (HEDS) experiments, including the demonstration of inertial fusion ignition and burn. To meet this goal, its 192-beam frequency-converted neodymium-glass laser must deliver up to 1.8-MJ total energy at 351nm, with peak power of 500 TW and precisely-controlled temporal pulse shapes spanning two orders of magnitude. Over the past two years, a series of detailed measurements have been performed on one beamline of the NIF laser at 1ω(1053nm), 2ω(526.5nm), and 3ω(351 nm). Results of these experiments lend confidence to the expectation that NIF will meet its laser performance design criteria and that it will be able to simultaneously deliver the temporal pulse shaping, focal spot conditioning, peak power, shot-to-shot reproducibility, and power balance required for indirect-drive fusion ignition campaigns. The NIF final optics system has also been demonstrated to be capable of operating at 2ω energies of up to 17.9kJ/beamline—3.4MJ for a similarly configured 192-beam NIF. We discuss the status of NIF commissioning, and the nature and results of these measurement campaigns.