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Techniques have been developed to improve the unifoimity of the laser focal profile, to reduce the ablative Rayleigh-Taylor &stability, and to suppress the various laser-plasma instabilities. There are now three diiectdrive ignition target designs that utilize these techniques. Evaluation of these designs is still ongoing. Some of them may achieve the gains above 100 that are necessary for a fusion reactor. Two laser systems have been proposed that niay meet all of the requirements for a fusion reactor.

A new laser fusion target concept is presented with a predicted energy gain of 127 using a 1.3 MJ KrF laser. This energy gain is sufficiently high for an economically attractive fusion reactor. X rays from high- and low-Z materials are used in combination with a low-opacity ablator to spatially tune the isentrope, thereby providing both high fuel compression and a reduction of the ablative Rayleigh–Taylor instability.

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Krypton-fluoride (KrF) lasers are of interest to laser fusion because they have both the large bandwidth capability (≳THz) desired for rapid beam smoothing and the short laser wavelength (1/4 μm) needed for good laser–target coupling. Nike is a recently completed 56-beam KrF laser and target facility at the Naval Research Laboratory. Because of its bandwidth of 1 THz FWHM (full width at half-maximum), Nike produces more uniform focal distributions than any other high-energy ultraviolet laser. Nike was designed to study the hydrodynamic instability of ablatively accelerated planar targets. First results show that Nike has spatially uniform ablation pressures (Δp/p<2%). Targets have been accelerated for distances sufficient to study hydrodynamic instability while maintaining good planarity. In this review we present the performance of the Nike laser in producing uniform illumination, and its performance in correspondingly uniform acceleration of targets.

This paper describes theoretical and experimental investigations of induced spatial incoherence (ISI), a technique for achieving the smooth and controllable target beam profiles required for direct-drive laser fusion. In conventional ISI, a broadband laser beam (coherence time tc=1/Δν≪tpulse) is sliced into an array of mutually incoherent beamlets by echelon structures that impose successive time delay increments Δt>tc. A focusing lens then overlaps those beamlets onto the target, which is usually located at the far field. Here, we evaluate the ideal target beam profiles for practical ISI focusing configurations, and examine the perturbing effects of transient interference, laser aberration, and plasma filamentation. Analytic and numerical calculations show that nonuniformities due to interference among the beamlets are smoothed by both thermal diffusion and temporal averaging. Under laser-plasma conditions of interest to inertial confinement fusion (ICF), average ablation pressure nonuniformities ∼1% should be readily attainable. We also investigate a partial ISI scheme, which allows widely spaced beamlets to remain mutually coherent; the resulting high spatial frequency interference structure can be effectively smoothed by thermal diffusion alone. A perturbation analysis shows that the average target profile 〈I(x)〉 remains relatively insensitive to laser beam aberration when the scale length of that aberration is larger than the initial beamlet width. This aberration will tend to broaden and smooth 〈I(x)〉, rather than introduce any small-scale structure. The broadening is largely controllable because it depends only upon spatial averages of the aberrated quantities over the entire laser aperture; the uncontrollable perturbations can be reduced to ∼1% in practical cases. Filamentation in the underdense plasma has been studied numerically using a 2D propagation/hydro code selfoct, which includes both ponderomotive and thermal effects. For 0.25-μm light, this code predicts that ISI should suppress filamentation in plasmas of interest to ICF. We review recent planar target experiments carried out at the Naval Research Laboratory using 1.054- and 0.527-μm light, which show that the combination of ISI and shorter wavelength substantially reduces all evidence of plasma instabilities. Finally, we review a promising alternative technique for achieving ISI in KrF lasers without using echelons.

We have developed an improved x-ray imaging system based on spherically curved crystals. It is designed and used for diagnostics of targets ablatively accelerated by the Nike KrF laser. A spherically curved quartz crystal (d = .?, R = mm) has been used to produce monochromatic backlit images with the He-like Si resonance line (1865 eV) as the source of radiation. The spatial resolution of the x-ray optical system is 1.7 mum in selected places and 2-3 mum over a larger area. Time-resolved backlit monochromatic images of polystyrene planar targets driven by the Nike facility have been obtained with a spatial resolution of 2.5 mum in selected places and 5 mum over the focal spot of the Nike laser.