Laser Megajoule performance status.

The Laser Megajoule (LMJ) is among the most energetic inertial confinement fusion laser facilities in the world, together with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the USA. The construction of the facility began back in 2003, and the first photons were emitted by the laser bundle #28 in 2014. Today, 11 laser bundles consisting of 88 large aperture 0.

A powerful tool for comparing different test procedures to measure the probability and density of laser induced damage on optical materials.

The determination of the laser damage resistance of optics in the nanosecond regime is based on statistical tests and approaches because the response of the components is mainly related to the presence of defects randomly distributed in the optics and is therefore probabilistic in nature. For practical reasons, the tests are mostly carried out with beams of small dimensions (several tens of micrometer), that make it possible to determine a damage probability from which a laser damage threshold is extracted. This threshold is, however, highly correlated with the size of the test beam and the sampling of the test procedure.