A study of timing jitter improvements on Z with a new laser triggering system

Author

Rogowski, Sonrisa T. ; Bliss, David E. ; Adams, Richard G. ; Struve, Kenneth W.

Author_Institution

Sandia Nat. Labs., Albuquerque, NM, USA

Volume

2

fYear

2003

fDate

15-18 June 2003

Firstpage

1371

Abstract

A new, low jitter, laser trigger system (LTS) has been installed on the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories. The installation of the new tempest LTS has significantly reduced the jitter of the peak X-ray output. The most recent measurements of peak X-ray output show that the new LTS has reduced the jitter from 1/spl sigma/ = 2.5 ns to 1/spl sigma/ < 1 ns. In addition to having inherently less jitter than the old LTS, the independent precision triggering of the new LTS can compensate for timing errors due to drift and shot-to-shot correlations of other pulse power components further reducing the overall machine jitter. Specifically, the LTS compensates for trends in the gas switch runtime. By using a method based on linear prediction coefficients of previous shots, gas switch runtime noise can be further reduced by 1 ns.

Keywords

laser beam applications; switches; timing jitter; 1 ns; 2.5 ns; X-ray output; gas switch runtime; laser triggering system; linear prediction; machine jitter; precision triggering; pulse power components; pulse shaping; shot-to-shot correlations; timing errors; timing jitter improvements; Gas lasers; Laboratories; Laser fusion; Optical pulses; Runtime; Space vector pulse width modulation; Switches; Timing jitter; US Department of Energy; X-ray lasers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Pulsed Power Conference, 2003. Digest of Technical Papers. PPC-2003. 14th IEEE International

Conference_Location

Dallas, TX, USA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7915-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PPC.2003.1278070

Filename

1278070