Performance of smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSO) for the National Ignition Facility

Summary form only given. Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) utilizing direct or indirect laser drive requires the target illumination to be uniform over a wide range of spatial frequencies. A number of approaches have been suggested to achieve the desired level of illumination uniformity. Angular dispersion of phase modulated (FM) light (termed smoothing by spectral dispersion-SSD) is attractive for ICF using glass lasers, since pure phase modulation preserves the uniform intensity profiles necessary for high power laser amplification. 1D SSD has been demonstrated on the Nova laser, however the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will require much more efficient and reliable operation. Therefore, it is of interest to investigate the performance of 1D SSD on the Beamlet laser, which is a NIF prototypical multipass laser system.