StarDriver: Recent results on beam smoothing and LPI mitigation

Abstract

StarDriver was recently proposed as a highly flexible laser driver for inertial confinement fusion and high energy density physics. It envisions a laser drive consisting of very many beams at an aperture and energy where the optical technology is well-developed, used in concert to create a large scale laser driver system. In this paper we describe a StarDriver-class laser with 5120 physical beamlets disposed about the target chamber in 80 evenly spaced ports, each port containing 64 beamlets, each beamlet having about 1.5THz of 2D SSD bandwidth and suitable phase plates, an aperture of ∼65mm, an energy of 80J, and frequency-converted to ∼351nm.many beamlets at an aperture where optical technology is well-developed, and each beamlet has energy ∼100J in a several times diffraction limited beam. The ensemble of beamlets has frequency bandwidth 2%-10%, thereby providing significant control of both hydrodynamic and laser-plasma instabilities The drive at the target is ∼400kJ, has a well-behaved low L-mode spectrum, and smooths very rapidly, reaching an asymptotic smoothness of <1% in less than Ins.