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The novel octahedral spherical hohlraum can provide an ideal and practical approach for the next generation of laser systems to support both direct and indirect drive to achieve predictable and reproducible fusion gain via multiple schemes. To demonstrate its advantage in a naturally high symmetry at a cylindrically configured laser facility, it requires to repoint the laser beams to approach as close as possible the ideal octahedral beam configuration with an injection angle (the angle between a beam and the normal direction of its laser entrance hole (LEH)) ranging from 50° to 60°. We report our investigation and experiment on the optimum repointing scheme at the SGIII facility, which uses 32 beams, with 8 beams entering each polar LEH at 49.5° and 55°, and 4 beams entering each equatorial LEH at 61.5° and 62.1°. It contains residual imbalance between the polar and equatorial beams, leading to an asymmetry dominated by the spherical harmonic Y20 mode, which can be remarkably reduced by the stronger backscatters of equatorial beams. Our experiment demonstrated the feasibility of the 32-beam optimum repointing scheme and generation of 175 eV under 86 kJ inside a 2.4-mm-radius octahedral hohlraum with 0.7-mm-radius LEHs, which provided a strong support for the later experiment on proof-of-concept of octahedral spherical hohlraum [Lan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 245001 (2021)]. 2D simulations on LEH closure agree well with the observations. This work opens a novel way of realization of a quasi-spherical irradiation at a cylindrically configured laser facility without supplementary symmetry control.

In inertial confinement approaches to fusion, the asymmetry of target implosion is a major obstacle to achieving high gain in the laboratory. A recently proposed octahedral spherical hohlraum makes it possible to naturally create spherical target irradiation without supplementary symmetry control. Before any decision is made to pursue an ignition-scale laser system based on the octahedral hohlraum, one needs to test the concept with the existing facilities. Here, we report a proof-of-concept experiment for the novel octahedral hohlraum geometry on the cylindrically configured SGIII laser facility without a symmetry control. All polar and equatorial self-emission images of the compressed target show a near round shape of convergence ratio 15 under both square and shaped laser pulses. The observed implosion performances agree well with the ideal spherical implosion simulation. It also shows limitations with using the existing facilities and adds further weight to the need to move to a spherical port geometry for future ignition laser facilities.

An effective diode-side-pumped joule-level square-rod Nd:glass multipass amplifier with 1 Hz repetition rate is developed. A Pockels cell is used to extend the amplification-pass to twelve-pass. The linear depolarization compensation method and adaptive optics based wavefront aberration correction method are used to minimize the thermal effects. Combined with the relay-imaging technology and beam-shaping method, good beam quality is obtained. Under the small-signal gain of 3.23 and the input energy of 50 µJ, the output energy of 1 J and the net gain of 2×104 are realized. The effective energy-extraction efficiency in the whole aperture of Nd:glass rod is 12%. The total wavefront aberration is 1.1 µm (peak valley). The Strehl Ratio is 0.62, and 90% of far-field energy is concentrated in 3 times the diffraction limit. The near-field modulation index of twelve-pass amplification at 1 J is 1.4.

In high power laser facility, the waveform measurement of UV pulse injected to target is very important for power balanced control and experiment result analysis. A time division multiplex UV frequency modulation pulse waveform measurement system based on fiber bundle and lens array is built for a high precise measurement result as well as low construction and maintaining cost. The system can remarkably improve coupling efficiency inject to fiber contribution to the aperture splicing sampling technology and a 50μm multi-mode UV fiber specially developed with 9.2GHz bandwidth@60m transmission. A “four-in-one” time division multiplex measurement system is built for laser facility and the practical experiment indicated that the system can realize precise waveform measurement within good economy and anti-interference performance.

Radially polarized laser beams, which could generate longitudinal electric fields (LEF) in the far field after being focused have drawn increasing interest in wide fields. However, it is difficult to boost a radially polarized laser pulse to high peak power due to its spatially inhomogeneous polarization distribution. Here, we propose a vector superposition approach, firstly partition a linearly polarized beam into two parts in the near field, secondly modulate their polarization direction separately using the electro-optical effect and finally focus them using a high numerical aperture lens, thereby generating the LEF in the far field owing to vector superposition. This approach can amplify a laser pulse to the required peak power by using traditional schemes of the linearly polarized seed-pulse generation and multi-pass amplification, thereby efficiently scaling the LEF to the required magnitude. The simulation results support the theory in concluding that the approach would be a competent way to achieve super strong LEF in the far field of a laser beam.

A new relay-imaged off-axial eight-pass laser amplifier with several joules energy and 1 Hz repetition rate was demonstrated. The extraction efficiency and pulse-to-pulse energy stability were greatly improved. Under the single-pass small-signal gain of 3.6, a net gain of 900 and an effective extraction efficiency of 42.4% in the beam aperture were realized. Pulse-to-pulse energy stability of 0.83% (peak–valley) and 0.17% (root-mean-square) was achieved by the significant saturation of eight-pass amplification, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the best energy stability in several-joules-class amplifiers. The far-field quality was 2.52 times the diffraction limit, and the near-field modulation of the 90% beam aperture was 1.28. No parasitic oscillations or pencil beams were observed. Moreover, another key feature of the proposed amplifier was the ability to remarkably improve the pulse contrast with a unique design.

The first octahedral spherical hohlraum energetics experiment is accomplished at the SGIII laser facility. For the first time, the 32 laser beams are injected into the octahedral spherical hohlraum through six laser entrance holes. Two techniques are used to diagnose the radiation field of the octahedral spherical hohlraum in order to obtain comprehensive experimental data. The radiation flux streaming out of laser entrance holes is measured by six flat-response x-ray detectors (FXRDs) and four M-band x-ray detectors, which are placed at different locations of the SGIII target chamber. The radiation temperature is derived from the measured flux of FXRD by using the blackbody assumption. The peak radiation temperature inside hohlraum is determined by the shock wave technique. The experimental results show that the octahedral spherical hohlraum radiation temperature is in the range of 170-182 eV with drive laser energies of 71 kJ to 84 kJ. The radiation temperature inside the hohlraum determined by the shock wave technique is about 175 eV at 71 kJ. For the flat-top laser pulse of 3 ns, the conversion efficiency of gas-filled octahedral spherical hohlraum from laser into soft x rays is about 80% according to the two-dimensional numerical simulation.

Adaptive optics is a real-time compensation technique using high speed support system for wavefront errors caused by atmospheric turbulence. However, the randomness and instantaneity of atmospheric changing introduce great difficulties to the design of adaptive optical systems. A large number of complex real-time operations lead to large delay, which is an insurmountable problem. To solve this problem, hardware operation and parallel processing strategy are proposed, and a high-speed adaptive optical control system based on DSP is developed. The hardware counter is used to check the system. The results show that the system can complete a closed loop control in 7.1ms, and improve the controlling bandwidth of the adaptive optical system. Using this system, the wavefront measurement and closed loop experiment are carried out, and obtain the good results.

The laser pulse should be shaped to satisfy the ICF physical requirement and the profile should be flattened to increase the extraction efficiency of the disk amplifiers and to ensure system safety in ICF laser facility. The spatial-temporal distribution of the laser pulse is affected by the gain saturation, uniformity gain profile of the amplifiers, and the frequency conversion process. The pulse spatial-temporal distribution can’t be described by simply analytic expression, so new iteration algorithms are needed. We propose new inversion method and iteration algorithms in this paper. All of these algorithms have been integrated in SG99 software and the validity has been demonstrated. The result could guide the design of the ICF laser facility in the future.

Rapid grown KDP and DKDP crystals have obvious phase jump at the pyramid–prism (PY-PR) interfaces, which will give rise to intensity modulation to the propagation beam. In this paper, the basic properties of phase jump at the PY-PR interfaces in rapid grown KDP and DKDP crystals are firsly characterized and compared. Then, the influence of the interface’s phase jump on the third harmonic beam modulation is researched by the third-harmonic-generation (THG) experiment. It is found that there exist two PY-PR interfaces in the KDP crystal (SHG1 and SHG2) shaping a “bamboo hat” and three PY-PR interfaces in the DKDP crystal (THG1, THG2 and THG3) shaping a “basin”. The phase-jump magnitude of the PY-PR interface in DKDP crystal is about 1.8 times larger than that in KDP crystal. The THG1 interface, at the bottom of the “basin”, has the largest root-mean-squared gradient (GRMS) of the phase jump, which arouses about 1.6 times modulations to the THG beam. To suppress the beam modulation, the GRMS of phase jump at the PY-PR interface is suggested below 1.2 λ/mm.

Integration-Test-Bed(ITB) is China's first laser devices with single-beam ten-thousand joules output for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) research. In this paper we describe the development of single-segment slab amplifiers for Integration-Test-Bed (ITB) with 400mm× 400mm aperture. The experiment results shows that the average small signal gain coefficient in 400mm×400mm aperture reach 5.28%/cm with the gain uniformity is about 1.09:1(maximum value/ average value), and up to 1.063:1 (maximum value/ average value) in 360mm×360mm beam-diameter clear aperture. The storage efficiency of system is about 1.47%. The pump-induced wave-front distortion is 5.3λ for the laser beams, which within the correction range of deformable mirror; the thermal recovery time was less than 4 hours. All of this guaranteed the output of 19.6kJ/5ns with wavelength of 1053nm from the Integration-Test-Bed (ITB) device.

SG-III laser facility is now the largest laser driver for inertial confinement fusion research in China. The whole laser facility can deliver 180 kJ energy and 60 TW power ultraviolet laser onto target, with power balance better than 10%. We review the laser system and introduce the SG-III laser performance here.

Large-aperture electro-optical switch based on plasma Pockels cell (PPC) is one of important components for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) laser facility. We have demonstrated a single-pulse driven 4×1 PPC with 400mm×400mm aperture for SGIII laser facility. And four 2×1 PPCs modules with 350mm×350mm aperture have been operated in SGII update laser facility. It is different to the PPC of NIF and LMJ for its simple operation to perform Pockels effect. With optimized operation parameters, the PPCs meet the SGII-U laser requirement of four-pass amplification control. Only driven by one high voltage pulser, the simplified PPC system would be provided with less associated diagnostics, and higher reliability. To farther reduce the insert loss of the PPC, research on the large-aperture PPC based on DKDP crystal driven by one pulse is developed. And several single-pulse driven PPCs with 80mm×80mm DKDP crystal have been manufactured and operated in laser facilities.

We demonstrate the design and performance of an optical switch that has been constructed for the SG-II upgrading facility. The device is a longitudinal, potassium di-hydrogen phosphate (KDP), 360 mm×360 mm aperture, and 2×1 array electro-optical switch driven by a 20 kV output switching-voltage pulse generator through two plasma electrodes produced at the rise edge of the switching-voltage pulse. The results show that the temporal responses and the spatial performance of the optical switch fulfill the operation requirements of the SG-II upgrading facility.

Beam alignment is crucial to high-power laser facilities and is used to adjust the laser beams quickly and accurately to meet stringent requirements of pointing and centering. In this paper, a novel alignment method is presented, which employs data processing of the two-dimensional power spectral density (2D-PSD) for a near-field image and resolves the beam pointing error relative to the spatial filter pinhole directly. Combining this with a near-field fiducial mark, the operation of beam alignment is achieved. It is experimentally demonstrated that this scheme realizes a far-field alignment precision of approximately 3% of the pinhole size. This scheme adopts only one near-field camera to construct the alignment system, which provides a simple, efficient, and low-cost way to align lasers.

We demonstrate a hybrid-electrode Pockels cell (HEPC) using a thin z-cut deuterated potassium dihydrogen phosphate (DKDP) crystal. The device is a reflective, longitudinally driven, longitudinally cooled Pockels cell, constructed with a plasma chamber providing the incident-side electrode and a silicon-substrate mirror serving the three purposes of a mirror, a back-side electrode, and a heat sink. The mirror and the DKDP are thermally coupled through a sub-millimeter, inert gas-filled gap. A time-multiplex pass-by driving method is proposed to favor low-voltage and fast-response operation. The experimental results support that the HEPC would be a competent device for high-energy and high-repetition-rate lasers.

In this talk, we propose and demonstrate the process-oriented adaptive optics (AO) wavefront control method, for optimizing the beam quality in the multi-pass amplifiers. Different from the conventional target-oriented wavefront control approach, the novel method divides the aberration correction process into several steps, to optimize the wavefront quality in time during the courses of the beam's transport and amplification. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively prevent the beam quality from worsening and ensure the successful reality of multi-pass amplification, so it has obvious advantages both in efficiency and accuracy over the traditional target-oriented method.

The Integration Test Bed (ITB) is a large-aperture single-beam Nd:glass laser system, built to demonstrate the key technology and performance of the laser drivers. It uses two multipass slab amplifiers. There are four passes through the main amplifier and three passes through the booster amplifier. The output beam size is 360mm by 360mm, at the level of 1% of the top fluence. The designed output energy of ITB at 1053nm is 15kJ in a 5ns flat-in-time (FIT) pulse, the third harmonic conversion efficiency is higher than 70%. The first phase of the ITB has been completed in July 2013. A series of experiments demonstrated that laser performance meets or exceeds original design requirements. It has achieved maximum energies at 1053nm of 19.6kJ at 5ns and 21.5kJ at 10ns. Based on a pair of split third harmonic generation KDP crystals, the third harmonic conversion efficiency of about 70% and 3ω mean fluences as high as 8.4 J/cm 2 have been obtained with 5ns FIT pulse.

A laser-induced damage array composed of numerous pinpoints is generated in a large-aperture KDP crystal to suppress the transverse stimulated Raman scattering (TSRS). The 36 cm × 8.5 mm × 7 mm damage array is used to block the propagation of the TSRS photons within the crystal and decrease the TSRS gain length. Then several series of experiments were conducted on a large-aperture laser system to test this method and experimental results show that the amplification of TSRS is significantly suppressed by the laser-induced damage array.

optical propagation simulation by SG99 code and invert algorithm has been made for two typical laser architecture, namely the National Ignition Facility (model A) and SG-III laser facility (model B) based on measured 400mm aperture Nd:glass slab gain distribution data on ITB system. When the gain nonuniformity is about 5%, 7%, and 9% respectively within 395x395mm 2 aperture and output beam aperture is 360x360mm 2 , and output energy is about 16kJ/5ns(square) with B-integral limited, 1ω(1053nm) nearfield modulation is about 1.10, 1.15, and 1.30 respectively for model A (11+7 slab configuration), and 1.07, 1.08, and 1.17 respectively for model B (9+9 slab configuration) without spatial gain compensation. With the above three gain nonuniformity and slab configuration unchanged, to achieve flat-in-top output near field, the compensation depth of the input near field is about 1.5:1, 2.0:1, and 6.0:1 respectively for model A, and 1.3:1, 1.4:1, and 3.5:1 respectively for model B. Compared with model A (the beam aperture unchanged in multi-pass amplification), the influence of slab gain nonuniformity on model B (beam aperture changed) is smaller. All the above simulation results deserve further experiment study in the future.

Plasma Pockels cell (PPC), which can use a thin crystal to perform the uniform electro-optical effect, is ideal component as average-power optical switch with large aperture. In this paper, by reformative design and employing a capacity to share the gas discharge voltage, the DKDP PPC driven by one pulse is realized. As gas breakdown delay time is stable, and discharge plasma is uniformly filled the full aperture, it meets the demand of plasma electrode for the repetition-rate PPC with DKDP crystal. A rep-rate plasma Pockels cell (PPC) with Φ30mm aperture has been fabricated. It is optimized with the limited space of repetition rate diode pumped laser. The specification of the PPC is: static transition of 97.2%, switching efficiency of 99.8%, the switch rising time of 8.6ns. In the LD pumped Yb:YAG plate laser system, the PPC can steadily work on 10Hz repetition rate performed as Q-switch. The key problems in PPC are analyzed for repetition-rate application, and thermo-optical effects are simulated by means of numerical modeling when average power laser is loaded on the electro-optical crystal. Furthermore, the principium design of rep-rate PPC with longitudinally conductive cooled structure is described in this paper. It will efficiently abate the thermo-optical effects under repetition rate application.

Large-aperture plasma Pockels cell is one of important components for inertial confinement fusion laser facility. We demonstrate a single-pulse driven PPC with 350mm×350mm aperture. It is different to the PPC of NIF and LMJ for its simple operation to perform Pockels effect. With optimized operation parameters, the PPC meets the optical switching requirement of SGII update laser facility. Only driven by one high voltage pulser, the simplified PPC system would be provided with less associated diagnostics, less the maintenance, and higher reliability.

We propose a process to evaluate the safe limit of large-aperture DKDP crystals associated with transverse stimulated Raman scattering (TSRS) at the wavelength of 351 nm. The DKDP crystals’ safety can be assured by controlling the intensity of TSRS-scattering light to the same order of that of Rayleigh-scattering light. We use an optical fiber sensor system to detect side-scattering light in the DKDP and compare the intensity between Raman- and Rayleigh-scattering light. By defining the threshold intensity as a condition in which the intensity ratio between transverse Raman-scattering light and Rayleigh-scattering light exceeds 1, we obtain the threshold intensity of approximately 2.6 GW/cm2 in our experiment. This method enables us to determine the TSRS threshold directly instead of measuring the TSRS gain coefficient and edge reflectivity of the crystals.

Laser-induced damage often determines the effective lifetime of an optic in large high-energy laser facilities. We present the damage performance on the rear surface of a large-aperture KDP crystal for 351 nm, 5 ns laser pulses. Surface damage shows a lower threshold than bulk damage after conditioning. Craters initiated on the scratch are found to increase with the shot number before filling the scratch. The experimental results reveal that damage initiation is mainly caused by extrinsic nanoabsorbers buried in the surface during the large-aperture laser operation.