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Implementing the capability to perform fast ignition experiments, as well as, radiography experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) places stringent requirements on the control of each of the beam's pointing and overall wavefront quality. One quad of the NIF beams, 4 beam pairs, will be utilized for these experiments and hydrodynamic and particle-in-cell simulations indicate that for the fast ignition experiments, these beams will be required to deliver 50%(4.0 kJ) of their total energy(7.96 kJ) within a 40 μm diameter spot at the end of a fast ignition cone target. This requirement implies a stringent pointing and overall phase conjugation error budget on the adaptive optics system used to correct these beam lines. The overall encircled energy requirement is more readily met by phasing of the beams in pairs but still requires high Strehl ratios, Sr, and RMS tip/tilt errors of approximately one μrad. To accomplish this task we have designed an interferometric adaptive optics system capable of beam pointing, high Strehl ratio and beam phasing with a single pixilated MEMS deformable mirror and interferometric wave-front sensor. We present the design of a testbed used to evaluate the performance of this wave-front sensor below along with simulations of its expected performance level.

Horizontal path correction of optical beam propagation presents a severe challenge to adaptive optics systems due to the short transverse coherence length and the high degree of scintillation incurred by propagation along these paths. The system presented operates with nearly monochromatic light. It does not require a global reconstruction of the phase, thereby eliminating issues with branch points and making its performance relatively unaffected by scintillation. The systems pixel count, 1024, and relatively high correction speed, in excess of 800 Hz, enable its use for correction of horizontal path beam propagation. We present results from laboratory and field tests of the system in which we have achieved Strehl ratios greater than 0.5.

Atmospheric induced aberrations can seriously degrade laser performance, greatly affecting the beam that finally reaches the target. Lasers propagated over any distance in the atmosphere suffer from a significant decrease in fluence at the target due to these aberrations. This is especially so for propagation over long distances. It is due primarily to fluctuations in the atmosphere over the propagation path, and from platform motion relative to the intended aimpoint. Also, delivery of high fluence to the target typically requires low beam divergence, thus, atmospheric turbulence, platform motion, or both results in a lack of fine aimpoint control to keep the beam directed at the target. To improve both the beam quality and amount of laser energy delivered to the target, Northrop Grumman has developed the Active Tracking System (ATS); a novel linear phase conjugation aberration compensation technique. Utilizing a silicon spatial light modulator (SLM) as a dynamic wavefront reversing element, ATS undoes aberrations induced by the atmosphere, platform motion or both. ATS continually tracks the target as well as compensates for atmospheric and platform motion induced aberrations. This results in a high fidelity, near-diffraction limited beam delivered to the target.

We have constructed a laser utilizing five 10 W cw diode bars to transverse-pump a Tm:YAG rod in a multiple-pass pump cavity. At an estimated rod temperature of 35 - 40 degree(s)C, 6.0 W of multi-mode and 3.8 W of single-mode output were obtained at 2.02 micrometers in a non- optimized resonator with 50 W incident pump power.