The Design of Optical Pulse Shapes with an Aperture- Coupled-Stripline Pulse-Shaping System

LLE Review, Volume 78 97 Laser-fusion experiments require precise control of the temporal profile of optical pulses applied to targets. An optical pulse– shaping system has been in operation on OMEGA for several years.1 During this time the demands on the precision, flexibility, and repeatability of the optical pulse–shaping system have steadily increased. To meet these new demands, a new pulseshaping system based on an aperture-coupled stripline (ACSL) electrical-waveform generator has been developed and discussed previously.2 This new system will be implemented on OMEGA in the next few months. In addition to its simplicity, the new system will include significant improvements to the modeling, performance, and diagnostics of the pulse-shaping system to meet the challenging demands required of the system. The shaped optical pulses produced by this system become the seed pulses that are injected into the OMEGA laser system. Details of the on-target pulse shape from the OMEGA laser are critically related to the details of the seed-pulse shape. This article describes the modeling of an ACSL pulse-shaping system that is used to produce an optical seed pulse with a specified temporal shape.