Abstract
Direct-drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets require extremely uniform laser beam profiles to prevent the growth of unwanted hydrodynamic instabilities. Two approaches have been taken to meet beam-smoothing requirements of direct-drive ICF: 1) using random phase plates to break the beam up info fine-scale speckle, which the target is able to smooth by thermal conduction, and 2) causing that speckle structure to rapidly vary in time to give a lime-averaged smooth beam.2 3 Earliest implementation of temporal smoothing was achieved using induced spatial incoherence (ISI)2; more recent application employs smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD).3
© 1991 Optical Society of America
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