Abstract
The NIKE laser is a KrF facility under construction at the Naval Research Laboratory, which will address technological and physics issues of direct-drive laser fusion. It will consist of a 48-56 beam angularly-multiplexed KrF laser delivering 3 - 4 kJ to a laser-target interaction facility. NIKE will implement the echelon-free ISI technique,1 which uses controlled spatial and temporal incoherence to produce a smooth time-averaged focal distribution. A broadband spatially-multimode KrF oscillator uniformly illuminates a spatial filter, which imposes the desired intensity profile on the beam. This profile is imaged onto the target by relaying its quasi far field through the amplifier system. The far-field encoding ensures that the image remains relatively insensitive to the usual large scale optical nonuniformities within the laser.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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