Illumination uniformity of capsules directly driven by a facility with thousands of laser beams

Abstract

The uniformity of the illumination of a spherical capsule directly driven by laser beams has been assessed numerically. Different schemes characterized by ND = 12, 20, 32, 48 and 60 directions of irradiation associated to a single laser beam or a bundle of NB laser beams have been considered. The laser beams intensity profile is assumed super-Gaussian and the calculations take into account for beam imperfections as power imbalance and pointing errors. These facilities are characterized by a large number of laser beams Ntot = NDxNB. Assuming relatively small laser beams with an energy of a few hundred of J (200 J–500 J) it turn out that a few thousand of beamlets (1000–5000) are needed in order to provide a total energy of 0.5–1 MJ. A large parametric study has been performed showing that the optimum laser intensity profile, which minimizes the root-mean-square deviation of the capsule illumination, depends on the values of the power imbalance and pointing error. Moreover, when beams imperfections are taken into account it is found that the uniformity of the illumination is almost the same for all facilities and only depends on the total number of laser beams Ntot.