Search

We propose a method for retrieving a beam wavefront from its near-field intensity distribution after a 4f system by simply inserting a benchmark at the Fourier plane. Through a convolution of the mark-blocked spatial frequency component and the original optical field with the 4f system, the separation between the focus of any sub-aperture and the benchmark can be determined to reconstruct the beam wavefront. Theoretical and experimental studies demonstrate the validity of this method, which has potential applications in real-time wavefront sensing.

The SG-Ⅲ laser facility (SG-Ⅲ) is the largest laser driver for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) researches in China, which has 48 beamlines and can deliver 180 kJ ultraviolet laser energy in 3 ns. In order to meet the requirements of precise physics experiments, some new functionalities need to be added to SG-Ⅲ and some intrinsic laser performances need upgrade. So at the end of SG-Ⅲ's engineering construction, the 2-year laser performance upgrade project started. This paper will introduce the newly added functionalities and the latest laser performance of SG-Ⅲ. With these function extensions and performance upgrade, SG-Ⅲ is now fully prepared for precise ICF experiments and solidly paves the way towards fusion ignition.

Laser-induced bulk damage in fused silica is studied on a large-aperture laser system with 6 J/cm2, 5-ns shot sequences at 351 nm. The lateral dimension of bulk damage is found to propagate exponentially with shot number in a wide range of growth rates, similar to the stochastic trend as displayed by rear-surface damage. Resemblance in the morphology between bulk and surface damage is revealed offline by microscopic observations. Arising from the accumulated effect of fluence variation, the repetitive laser exposures tend to create an increased number of bulk damage, the tendency of which is applied to evaluate the number of damage initiations via simulations.

In this paper, we give a review of our theoretical and experimental progress in octahedral spherical hohlraum study. From our theoretical study, the octahedral spherical hohlraums with 6 Laser Entrance Holes (LEHs) of octahedral symmetry have robust high symmetry during the capsule implosion at hohlraum-to-capsule radius ratio larger than 3.7. In addition, the octahedral spherical hohlraums also have potential superiority on low backscattering without supplementary technology. We studied the laser arrangement and constraints of the octahedral spherical hohlraums, and gave a design on the laser arrangement for ignition octahedral hohlraums. As a result, the injection angle of laser beams of 50°–60° was proposed as the optimum candidate range for the octahedral spherical hohlraums. We proposed a novel octahedral spherical hohlraum with cylindrical LEHs and LEH shields, in order to increase the laser coupling efficiency and improve the capsule symmetry and to mitigate the influence of the wall blowoff on laser transport. We studied on the sensitivity of the octahedral spherical hohlraums to random errors and compared the sensitivity among the octahedral spherical hohlraums, the rugby hohlraums and the cylindrical hohlraums, and the results show that the octahedral spherical hohlraums are robust to these random errors while the cylindrical hohlraums are the most sensitive. Up till to now, we have carried out three experiments on the spherical hohlraum with 2 LEHs on Shenguang(SG) laser facilities, including demonstration of improving laser transport by using the cylindrical LEHs in the spherical hohlraums, spherical hohlraum energetics on the SGIII prototype laser facility, and comparisons of laser plasma instabilities between the spherical hohlraums and the cylindrical hohlraums on the SGIII laser facility.