NIF
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2014 3:50 am
I spent the day Thursday out at NIF (they're a customer). I was able to go on a walkthrough inside laser bays and also some of the onsite manufacturing facilities. I never before really realized how small the targets actually are.
The laser technology was interesting, but certainly not state of the art. It was a "best of the 80's" sort of thing. The bay is two football fields long. Each of the 192 lasers start life in the IR spectrum. Repeated amplifiers and passed through plant food lenses (kdp or Potassium dihydrogen phosphate) serve to increase the power and transform the beam to the UV spectrum. By the time the lasers are focused on the target, you have 1.8MJ in the UV range for about a microsecond. Very cool stuff. I was able to get a selfie standing next to the Dante detector which is attached to the target chamber and was also a backdrop in the latest Star Trek movie.
NIF was recently in the news for obtaining unity in their recent DT fusion shots. In this case, unity doesn't mean the power input into the system = power out put. It means the power of the lasers actually hitting the target ... It doesn't account for losses generating the lasers using 80s technology. In any event. It was impressive.
J
The laser technology was interesting, but certainly not state of the art. It was a "best of the 80's" sort of thing. The bay is two football fields long. Each of the 192 lasers start life in the IR spectrum. Repeated amplifiers and passed through plant food lenses (kdp or Potassium dihydrogen phosphate) serve to increase the power and transform the beam to the UV spectrum. By the time the lasers are focused on the target, you have 1.8MJ in the UV range for about a microsecond. Very cool stuff. I was able to get a selfie standing next to the Dante detector which is attached to the target chamber and was also a backdrop in the latest Star Trek movie.
NIF was recently in the news for obtaining unity in their recent DT fusion shots. In this case, unity doesn't mean the power input into the system = power out put. It means the power of the lasers actually hitting the target ... It doesn't account for losses generating the lasers using 80s technology. In any event. It was impressive.
J