Abstract

The ablative acceleration of spheres and foils for direct drive inertial confinement fusion research requires extremely uniform spatial pressure profiles, which in turn demand extremely uniform laser intensity profiles. Less than two percent peak to valley ablation pressure nonuniformity may be essential to restrict the growth of the Rayleigh-Taylor hydrodynamic instability and to ensure adequate spherical implosion symmetry. During the past ten years, a large part of the direct drive laser fusion effort has been directed toward achieving this laser uniformity and demonstrating control of the Rayleigh-Taylor modes.

© 1993 Optical Society of America