The development of an improved streak tube for fusion diagnostics.

The fusion diagnostic community, including the National Ignition Facility, the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Megajoule in France, and others require optical recording instruments with precise time resolution covering a dynamic range of many orders of magnitude. In 2012, LLE, Photek, and Sydor Instruments embarked on the re-design of an improved streak tube for fusion diagnostics. As a baseline we started with the Photek ST-Y streak tube which is a member of the RCA design dating back to 1957, because the tube body can accommodate a 35 mm long photocathode, and consequently more fibre coupled diagnostic channels than smaller designs.

Measuring 8-250 ps short pulses using a high-speed streak camera on kilojoule, petawatt-class laser systems.

Short-pulse measurements using a streak camera are sensitive to space-charge broadening, which depends on the pulse duration and shape, and on the uniformity of photocathode illumination. An anamorphic-diffuser-based beam-homogenizing system and a space-charge-broadening calibration method were developed to accurately measure short pulses using an optical streak camera. This approach provides a more-uniform streak image and enables one to characterize space-charge-induced pulse-broadening effects.

Time-resolved measurements of hot-electron equilibration dynamics in high-intensity laser interactions with thin-foil solid targets.

Time-resolved K(α) spectroscopy has been used to infer the hot-electron equilibration dynamics in high-intensity laser interactions with picosecond pulses and thin-foil solid targets. The measured K(α)-emission pulse width increases from ~3 to 6 ps for laser intensities from ~10(18) to 10(19) W/cm(2). Collisional energy-transfer model calculations suggest that hot electrons with mean energies from ~0.

Scaling hot-electron generation to high-power, kilojoule-class laser-solid interactions.

Thin-foil targets were irradiated with high-power (1 ≤ P(L) ≤ 210 TW), 10-ps pulses focused to intensities of I>10(18) W/cm(2) and studied with K-photon spectroscopy. Comparing the energy emitted in K photons to target-heating calculations shows a laser-energy-coupling efficiency to hot electrons of η(L-e) = 20 ± 10%. Time-resolved x-ray emission measurements suggest that laser energy is coupled to hot electrons over the entire duration of the incident laser drive.

A dual-channel, curved-crystal spectrograph for petawatt laser, x-ray backlighter source studies.

A dual-channel, curved-crystal spectrograph was designed to measure time-integrated x-ray spectra in the approximately 1.5 to 2 keV range (6.2-8.