The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is home to the world’s largest laser system, the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The NIF with its 192 beam lines and over 40,000 optics has been an engine of innovation for lasers and optics technologies for the last couple of decades. The Lasers and Optics intellectual property portfolio is the culmination of the many groundbreaking developments in high energy, high peak power and ultrashort pulse laser system design and operation, including technologies related to Laser Diodes, Fiber & Disk Lasers, Compact Telescopes, High Damage Threshold Gratings, High Power Optical Components and their Fabrication and Coating Techniques. The thrust of the research and development at the NIF has been to realize novel approaches for laser systems, optical components and their applications that are more compact and higher efficiency while reliably delivering ever higher energy and peak power capabilities required in the furtherance of LLNL’s missions in Stockpile Stewardship and High Energy Density Science.
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It’s the late 1990s. Lloyd Hackel and Brent Dane are researchers in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) laser science and technology program.
They’re developing laser technology for X-ray lithography and satellite imaging research for the Department of Defense when the phone rings. On the line is Curtiss-Wright’s Metal Improvement Company (MIC) asking about something Hackel and Dane haven’t worked on before: high-peak-power laser peening for commercial applications in manufacturing.
This is an example of how LLNL’s mission-focused work advancing national security can lead to technology spin-offs with commercial importance through the Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO).
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Decades of cutting-edge laser, optics and plasma physics research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) played a key role in the underlying science that the semiconductor industry uses to manufacture advanced microprocessors. Now a new research partnership led by LLNL aims to lay the groundwork for the next evolution of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, centered around a Lab-developed driver system dubbed the Big Aperture Thulium (BAT) laser.
LLNL plasma physicists, Brendan Reagan and Jackson Williams, are the project’s co-lead principal investigators. The project includes scientists from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; ASML San Diego; and the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL), a public-private research center based in the Netherlands.
Starris: Optimax Space Systems and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have entered a commercialization partnership for LLNL’s patented monolithic telescope technology, which accelerates rapid deployment of modular optical designs for high-resolution or high-sensitivity space imagery.
Starris has collaborated over the last decade with LLNL’s Space Program to develop the monolithic telescope technology and will manufacture — at scale and with customization options — the precision-fabricated optical lens that forms the image in the telescope. The collaboration with LLNL is now extended via a government-use license for commercializing the technology through LLNL’s Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO).
The approach is to use appropriately doped semi-insulating gallium nitride to provide a high damage tolerant photoconductor with high responsivity to various pump wavelength light. Mn, C, or Fe are used as dopants to provide a source of electrons or holes that can be excited. This is combined with the use of dichroic antireflection coating at the GaN/polyimide/liquid crystal…
LLNL researchers have continued to develop their pioneering DIW 3D-printed glass optics technology that allows for the 3D printing of single- and multi-material optical glass compositions in complex shapes. This LLNL invention further proposes incorporating dopants (including, but not limited to TiO2 and Pd) into slurries and inks for 3D printing of glass components that can then be directly…
Rapid monolith development at scale is achieved through use of a functionally equivalent optic simulant made from a low-cost material to substitute the functional optic. Monolith optical performance is affected not only by thermal expansion but also by temperature inhomogeneity due to the temperature dependence of refractive index.
Aeroptics are a proposed new class of monolithic optical system in aerogel fabricated by molding around a master mandrel. This approach combines the intrinsic stability of proven monolithic telescopes, with the ultralow density of silica aerogels. In Aeroptics, the monolith is hollow with an aerogel substrate providing a supporting structure. Theoretically, Aeroptics could enable 1-m aperture…
This invention achieves both a wider field of view and faster f-number within a monolithic substrate by incorporating an aspheric convex refractive first surface and a planar aspheric field corrector surface on the final refractive surface. These two refractive surfaces work in conjunction with a concave aspheric primary and convex aspheric secondary mirror (e.g. Cassegrain type) to improve…
Monolithic Telescopes are a novel implementation of a solid catadioptric design form, instantiated in a monolithic block of fused silica.
LLNL is developing the Space-based Telescopes for Actionable Refinement of Ephemeris (STARE). STARE is a constellation of low cost nano-satellites (less than 5Kg) in low-earth orbit dedicated to the observation of space debris in conjunction with a ground-based infrastructure for maintenance, coordination and data processing. Each nano-satellite in the constellation is capable of recording an…