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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The space vehicle integrates LLNL’s Monolithic Telescope (MonoTele) technology with Terran Orbital’s proven expertise producing high-reliability space vehicles. Developed through a four-year, $6 million cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA), this mission demonstrates the power of collaboration in advancing compact satellites for commercial applications.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Space Program is now building an optical space domain awareness payload for an upcoming mission by the U.S. Space Force.
The planned mission, known as VICTUS HAZE, will be a tactically responsive space mission to demonstrate the ability to rapidly characterize an on-orbit threat.
The payload for VICTUS HAZE will use the LLNL monolithic telescope technology. LLNL’s monolithic telescopes are built out of a single piece of fused silica, eliminating the need for alignment and calibration after manufacture, while still providing the best possible resolution.
LLNL’s monolithic telescope was developed and patented by Lab employees Willem de Vries and Brian Bauman and former Lab employee Alex Pertica.
R&D World Magazine recently announced their 2022 award winners. LLNL researchers received three awards, which include Tailored Glass by Direct Ink Writing, novel compression gratings that enable a new class of high-energy laser systems and a 3D printing feedstock known as Energy Inks that can print a functioning battery.
This invention works by imaging an ultrafast pulse diffracted from a large grating onto a spatial light modulator (SLM) thereby directly transcribing an arbitrary record on a pulse front tilted (PFT) ultrafast pulse. The grating generates PFT of the input pulse, and the SLM provides temporal control of the pulse through the space-to-time mapping of the tilted pulse. Coupling this patterned…
This invention exploits the non-linearities of optical Mach-Zehnder (MZ) electrooptic modulators to enhance small signal dynamic range at higher bandwidths. A linear photodiode (PD) converts the amplified optical signal output from the MZ back to an electrical signal completing an Electrical-Optical-Electrical (EOE) conversion cycle. The dynamic range can be further enhanced by daisy chaining…
This invention proposes to engineer the current density along the length of a laser diode to overcome the penalty associated with non-uniformity resulting from asymmetry in the gain, photon or carrier density despite having uniform contact. Optimizing the current density profile enables diode lasers to operate with greater power conversion efficiency or operate with equivalent power conversion…
This invention proposes to engineer the temperature dependence of the emission wavelength of LEDs and laser diodes. The approach is to use a strain-inducing coating to counteract the intrinsic temperature coefficient of the emission wavelength of the LED or laser diode device thereby rendering it athermal. This invention avoids additional complexity, size, weight and power dissipation of…
This invention proposes a method to overcome the key limitation of electrically pumped lasers based on AlN, AlGaN, or AlInGaN, namely the lack of suitable shallow donor and acceptor dopants. As the band gap of these materials increases (and the emission wavelength decreases), both electrons and holes require greater thermal energies in order to ionize.
Laser diode lensing effect can be substantially reduced by creating a pattern interface such that the substrate is only attached at the diode mesa. This is achieved by either creating a pattern solder joint and/or pattern substrate.
This invention takes advantage of the high water-solubility of key NIF KDP crystal optics and uses water as an etchant to remove surface defects and improve the laser induced damage threshold. Since pure water etches KDP too fast, this invention is to disperse water as nanosized droplets in a water-in-oil micro-emulsion. While in a stable micro-emulsion form, the surfactant additives prevent…
This invention proposes to use laser induced melting/softening to locally reshape the form of a glass optic. The local glass densification that results induces predictable stresses that through plate deformation mechanics yield a deterministic methodology for arbitrarily reshaping an optic surface figure and wavefront without the need to remove material.
LLNL researchers in the NIF Directorate DoD Technologies RF Photonics Group explored phase modulation solutions to this signal processing challenge. Optical frequency combs offer phase noise characteristics that are orders of magnitude lower than available from commercial microwave references. The Photonics Group researchers recognized that by converting the intensity information into phase,…
LLNL's Slurry Stabilization Method provides a chemical means of stabilizing a polishing compound in suspension at working concentrations without reducing the rate of material removal. The treated product remains stable for many months in storage.