Beam Control and Laser Characterization for NIF

The demanding energy, power, pulse shape, focusability, pointing, and availability requirements placed on the 192 National Ignition Facility (NIF) beams lead to the need for an automatic operation capability that is well beyond that of previous inertial confinement fusion lasers.¹ Alignment, diagnostic, and wavefront correction subsystems are integrated in an approach that, by permitting maximal sharing of instrumentation between subsystems, meets performance requirements at a reasonable cost.