KrF Laser Fusion: Perform Optical Systems Study of Direct Short Pulse Extraction. Final Technical Report, 26 June 1978-14 March 1981

摘要

KrF is a prime candidate for a laser inertial confinement fusion (ICF) driver, however, there are still scaling issues to be addressed. The purpose of this program is to determine KrF performance in a regime of ICF interest both experimentally and analytically. Using a master oscillator-power amplifier (MOPA) configuration, 100J has been obtained from a five liter optical volume KrF amplifier pumped at 300 KW/cm exp 3 peak at the end of a 500 nsec pulse. A normalized input flux of 0.4 was required to reduce amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) to one half the free running value. A peak extraction efficiency of 0.46 was obtained under these conditions at 1 atm total pressure. The TRW kinetics model has been refined to give excellent agreement with high and low pump regimes. An integrated kinetics and pulse propagation code has also been developed and agrees well with experiment. (ERA citation 06:014544)