Abstract

High-power solid-state laser systems, such as Nova, that have been constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for research in inertial confinement fusion, have always pushed the state of the art of high damage thresholds for optical coatings and laser materials. We are currently constructing the Beamlet facility which is a prototype arm for a proposed Nova Upgrade. The latter would raise the net output laser energy by over an order of magnitude to 1.5-2.0 MJ at 351 nm with 3-ns pulses. We briefly describe the design of these systems to establish the motivation for improving the damage thresholds of conventional optical coatings as well as those of novel coating techniques. We discuss single and multilayer films used to fabricate highly reflective, antireflective, and polarizer coatings to be used at 1054 and 351 nm and perhaps shorter wavelengths. These coatings are fabricated or improved by numerous techniques which include variations of physical-vapor deposition, ion-beam sputtering, the solgel process, plasma chemical vapor deposition, laser conditioning, choice of materials, and substrate preparation.

© 1991 Optical Society of America