Abstract
The large, Nd-doped laser system for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is comprised of 192 separate beam lines that each produce about 20 kJ of 1.05 micron light. Simply stated, the architecture consists of a central, all-fiber master oscilla tor system, where the light is generated, shaped, modulated, and distributed to 192 beam lines. Next, 192 preamplifier modules amplify the tailored pulses from 1 nJ up to 10 J, whereupon they are transported to the large amplifier chains where the laser energy is increased to the 20 kJ level. The preamplifier modules contain a regenerative amplifier (regen) and a larger four-pass amplifier. The design specifications for the regen include a total gain of 107, an output energy of 10 mJ, operating at a 1-Hz pulse repetition rate, a square-pulse distortion <1.2, a signal-to-noise ratio >104, and a pulse-to-pulse output energy stability of better titan 3%.1 In this paper we describe the current design and performance of a long-pulse regenerative amplifier that uses two, diode-array, end-pumped Nd-doped glass amplifiers to achieve the desired performance.
© 1996 Optical Society of America
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