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Christmas Light
’Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house
No electrons were flowing through even my mouse.
All devices were plugged by the chimney with care
With the hope that St. Nikola Tesla would share.
Charles S. Vann, Erlan S. Bliss, James E. Murray
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 26 | Number 3 | November 1994 | Pages 833-836
National Ignition Facility | Proceedings of the Eleventh Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy New Orleans, Louisiana June 19-23, 1994 | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A40258
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate placement of hundreds of focused laser beams on target is necessary to achieve success in the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The current system requirement is ≤7 µrad error in output pointing and ≤1 mm error in focusing. To accommodate several system shots per day, a target alignment system must be able to align the target to chamber center, inject an alignment beam to represent each shot beam, and point and focus the alignment beams onto the target in about one hour. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we have developed a target alignment concept and built a prototype to validate the approach. The concept comprises three systems: the chamber center reference, target alignment sensor, and target alignment beams.