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LLNL's project to construct the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a 192 beam laser system capable of generating enough light energy necessary to achieve fusion ignition, will require 26,641 small optics, many of which will be supplied in the form of cleaned, tested and aligned assemblies. These assemblies will be built to print, cleaned to specifications, and tested to performance specifications, ready to be installed in the laser system. A wide range of potential suppliers will participate in the manufacture of these sophisticated opto-mechanical systems. The injection laser system requires 7,440 precision optical components manufactured to state of the art performance specifications. In addition to 550 aspheric lenses, almost 2,000 precision spherical elements are required. Wave-fronts are specified in terms of P-V, RMS and RMS Gradient wave-front error, with strict requirements on the filtering and resolution which is required. Precision polarizers, high reflectors, leaking mirrors, high damage threshold coatings and cleanliness levels of 50 to 100 are also specified for this section of the NIF laser. The alignment and diagnostics systems for the NIF require 19,201 optics, many of which have requirements that exceed those of the injection laser system. All of these optics will be purchased using the ISO 10110 drawing notations. Other sections of the laser system will utilize commercial, off the shelf components to control cost. This paper will give an overview of the project and its objectives, with specific attention to the small optics required for the NIF.

Atmospheric turbulence severely limits the resolution of ground-based telescopes. Adaptive optics can correct for the aberrations caused by the atmosphere, but requires a bright wavefront reference source in close angular proximity to the object being imaged. Since natural reference stars of the necessary brightness are relatively rare, methods of generating artificial reference beacons have been under active investigation for more than a decade. In this paper, we report the first significant image improvement achieved using a sodium-layer laser guide star as a wavefront reference for a high-order adaptive optics system. An artificial beacon was created by resonant scattering from atomic sodium in the mesosphere, at an altitude of 95 km. Using this laser guide star, an adaptive optics system on the 3 m Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory produced a factor of 2.4 increase in peak intensity and a factor of 2 decrease in full width at half maximum of a stellar image, compared with image motion compensation alone. The Strehl ratio when using the laser guide star as the reference was 65% of that obtained with a natural guide star, and the image full widths at half maximum were identical, 0.3 arc sec, using either the laser or the natural guide star. This sodium-layer laser guide star technique holds great promise for the world's largest telescopes.

A sodium-layer laser guide star adaptive optics system has been developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for use on the 3-meter Shane telescope at Lick Observatory. The system is based on a 127-actuator continuous-surface deformable mirror, a Hartmann wavefront sensor equipped with a fast-framing low-noise CCD camera, and a pulsed solid-state-pumped dye laser tuned to the atomic sodium resonance line at 589 nm. The adaptive optics system has been tested on the Shane telescope using natural reference stars yielding up to a factor of 12 increase in image peak intensity and a factor of 6.5 reduction in image full width at half maximum (FWHM). The results are consistent with theoretical expectations. The laser guide star system has been installed and operated on the Shane telescope yielding a beam with 22 W average power at 589 nm. Based on experimental data, this laser should generate an 8th magnitude guide star at this site, and the integrated laser guide star adaptive optics system should produce images with Strehl ratios of 0.4 at 2.2 {mu}m in median seeing and 0.7 at 2.2 {mu}m in good seeing.

We will describe an adaptive optics system developed for the 1 meter Nickel and 3 meter Shane telescopes at Lick Observatory. Observing wavelengths will be in the visible for the 1 meter telescope and in the near IR on the 3 meter. The adaptive optics system design is based on a 69 actuator continuous surface deformable mirror and a Hartmann wavefront sensor equipped with an intensified CCD framing camera. The system has been tested at the Cassegrain focus of the 1 meter telescope where the subaperture size is 12.5 cm. The wavefront control calculations are performed on a four processor single board computer controlled by a Unix-based system. We will describe the optical system and give details of the wavefront control system design. We will present predictions of the system performance and initial test results.

The architecture and major system components of the sodium-layer laser guide star system at LLNL will be described, and experimental results reported. The subsystems include the laser system, the beam delivery system including a pulse stretcher and beam pointing control, the beam director, and the telescope with its adaptive-optics package.

We describe the design and the early results of a feasibility experiment for sodium-layer laser-guide-star adaptive optics. Copper-vapor-laser-pumped dye lasers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation program are used to create the guide star. The laser beam is projected upward from a beam director that is located ~5 m from a 0.5-m telescope and forms an irradiance spot ~2 m in diameter at the atmospheric-sodium layer (at an altitude of 95 km). The laser guide star is approximately fifth magnitude and is visible to the naked eye at the top of the Rayleigh-scattered laser beam. To date, we have made photometric measurements and open-loop wave-front-sensor measurements of the laser guide star. We give an overview of the experiment’s design and the laser systems, describe the experimental setup, show preliminary photometric and open-loop wave-front-sensor data on the guide star, and present predictions of closed-loop adaptive-optics performance based on these experimental data. The long-term goal of this effort is to develop laser guide stars and adaptive optics for use with large astronomical telescopes.

We describe a series of experiments to characterize the sodium-layer guide star that was formed with the high-power laser developed for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation program. An emission spot size of 3.0 m was measured, with an implied laser irradiance spot diameter of 2.0 m. The rms spot motion at the higher laser powers, with active beam-pointing control, was less than 0.5 arcsec and had little effect on the observed spot size under these conditions. We measured the resonant backscatter from the sodium layer as a function of laser power to obtain a saturation curve. With a transmitted power of 1100 W and an atmospheric transmission of 0.6, the irradiance from the guide star at the ground was 10 (photons/cm2)/ms, corresponding to a visual magnitude of 5.1. The implications for the performance of wave-front sensors with a laser guide star of this magnitude and resulting closed-loop adaptive-optics performance are discussed.

A novel method has been developed for measuring surface absorption of optical coatings used in high power laser systems. Advantages of the method, which uses an infrared thermal camera to measure surface temperature and a detailed computer model of heat loss mechanisms to calculate surface absorption, include real time, non-contact measurement and in situ monitoring of optics under operational conditions. Surface absorptions ranging as low as 10/sup -5/ of the incident laser power can be measured with a 50 W test beam. The technique is used routinely to easily and quickly acquire data for coating performance sensitivity testing, coating development and for quality assessment of purchased optics. More importantly, it can identify hot absorbing coatings that are likely to fail in service or to become optically distorted in an operating laser system.