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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Robert H. Lehmberg, Julius Goldhar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 11 | Number 3 | May 1987 | Pages 532-541
Technical Paper | KrF Laser | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A25033
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A technique called echelon-free induced spatial incoherence is proposed for producing smooth, controllable target beam profiles with large KrF fusion lasers. The idea is basically an image projection technique that projects the desired time-averaged spatial profile F(x) onto the target via the laser system, using partially coherent broadband light. The information needed to reproduce F(x) is transported through the system by a multitude of independent coherence zones, whose diameters are small compared to scalelengths of linear aberration and gain nonuniformities; as a result, F(x) remains relatively insensitive to these effects. This concept is closely related to the induced spatial incoherence technique used with glass lasers, except that it does not require echelons at the output of the system. An analysis is carried out to evaluate the perturbations of F(x) due to linear aberration, self-focusing, gain saturation, and diffraction. It shows that under conditions applicable to large KrF lasers, the perturbations will result in a small broadening and smoothing of F(x), whose functional form should be controllable to within a few percent. The ability of this technique to generate smooth focal profiles is demonstrated using a small KrF discharge oscillator-preamplifier system.