Recent Performance Results of the National Ignition Facility Beamlet Demonstration Project

The laser driver for the National Ignition Facility will be a departure from previous inertial confinement fusion laser architecture of a master-oscillator single-pass power-amplifier (MOPA) design. The laser will use multi-segment Nd: Glass amplifiers in a multipass cavity arrangement, which can be assembled into compact and cost-effective arrays to deliver the required multi-megajoule energy to target. A single beam physics prototype, the Beamlet, has been in operation for over two years and has demonstrated the feasibility of this architecture. We present a short review of Beamlet's performance and limitations based on beam quality both at its fundamental and frequency converted wavelengths of 1.053 and 0.351 μm.