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).
This LLNL invention allows for the fabrication of complex waveplate features and topologies from fused silica, a highly desirable and durable waveplate material. It also is a unique technique for density multiplication and high-fidelity bidirectional deposition, which can create optical components that are generally for entirely new classes of optical materials.
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This LLNL invention concerns a method for patterning the index of refraction by fabricating a spatially invariant metasurface, and then apply spatially varied mechanical loading to compress the metasurface features vertically and spread them radially. In doing so, the index of refraction can be re-written on the metasurface, thus enabling index patterning. This process allows rapid 'rewriting…
This novel invention specifically enables the fabrication of arbitrarily tailored birefringence characteristics in nano-structured meta-surfaces on non-birefringent substrates (e.g. fused silica). The birefringent nano-structured meta-surface is produced by angled directional reactive ion beam etching through a nano-particle mask. This method enables the simultaneous tailoring of refractive…
This invention (US Patent No. 11,294,103) is an extension of another LLNL invention, US Patent No. 10,612,145, which utilizes a thin sacrificial metal mask layer deposited on a dielectric substrate (e.g. fused silica) and subsequently nanostructured through a laser generated selective thermal de-wetting process.
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 consists of a method of forming nanoscale metal lines to produce a grating-like mask with wide area coverage over the surface of a durable optical material such as fused silica. Subsequent etching processes transfer the metal mask to the underlying substrate forming a birefringent metasurface. This method enables the production of ultrathin waveplates for high power laser…
Heat sensitive materials such as piezoelectric and MEMS devices and assemblies, magnetic sensors, nonlinear optical crystals, laser glass or solid-state laser materials, etc. cannot be exposed to excess temperatures which in the context of this invention, means materials that cannot be exposed to temperatures greater than 50°C (122°F). LLNL’s invention describes a low-temperature method of…
This novel method of producing waveplates from isotropic optical materials (e.g. fused silica) consists of forming a void-dash metasurface using the following process steps:
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,…