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The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a high-power, 192-beam laser facility being built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The 192 laser beams that will converge on the target at the output of the NIF laser system originate from a low power fiber laser in the Master Oscillator Room (MOR). The MOR is responsible for generating the single pulse that seeds the entire NIF laser system. This single pulse is phase-modulated to add bandwidth, and then amplified and split into 48 separate beam lines all in single-mode polarizing fiber. Before leaving the MOR, each of the 48 output pulses are temporally sculpted into high contrast shapes using Arbitrary Waveform Generators (AWG). Each output pulse is then carried by optical fiber to the Preamplifier Module (PAM) where it is amplified to the multi-joule level using a diode-pumped regenerative amplifier and a multi-pass, flashlamp-pumped rod amplifier. Inside the PAM, the beam is spatially shaped to pre-compensate for the spatial gain profile in the main laser amplifiers. The output from the PAM is sampled by a diagnostic package called the Input Sensor Package (ISP) and then split into four beams in the Preamplifier Beam Transport System (PABTS). Each of these four beams is injected into one of NIF's 192 beam lines. The combination of the MOR, PAM, ISP and PABTS constitute the Injection Laser System (ILS) for NIF. This system has proven its flexibility of providing a wide variety of pulse shapes and energies during the first experiments utilizing four beam lines of NIF.

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The Neutron Imaging System (NIS) is an important diagnostic for understanding implosions of deuterium-tritium capsules at the National Ignition Facility. While the detectors for the existing system must be positioned 28 m from the source to produce sufficient imaging magnification and resolution, recent testing of a new short line of sight neutron imaging system has shown sufficient resolution to allow reconstruction of the source image with quality similar to that of the existing NIS on a 11.6 m line of sight. The new system used the existing pinhole aperture array and a stack of detectors composed of 2 mm thick high-density polyethylene converter material followed by an image plate. In these detectors, neutrons enter the converter material and interact with protons, which recoil and deposit energy within the thin active layer of the image plate through ionization losses. The described system produces time-integrated images for all neutron energies passing through the pinhole. We present details of the measurement scheme for this novel technique to produce energy-integrated neutron images as well as source reconstruction results from recent experiments at NIF.