Hafnia, a main optical material in high-energy laser applications, faces limitations due to precursors prone to laser damage. Addressing these precursors is critical to producing laser-resistant films. Nanobubbles within hafnia layers contribute to laser damage upon UV, nanosecond-laser exposure. This study examines hafnia film deposited by ion beam sputtering with different working gases, either Argon or Xenon. The effect of nanobubble size, which varies according to the working gas used, on the film performance under nanosecond-laser irradiation was investigated. The results indicate that the different nanobubble sizes influenced by the working gas affect the laser damage mechanism.
The National Ignition Facility’s (NIF) final fused silica optics are regularly exposed to fluences that
initiate and grow surface damage during high-energy operation. This mode of operation is enabled
by regularly recycling the optics to mitigate the initiated surface damage. Mitigation consists of
removing the fractured material associated with the damage by ablating a conical void into the fused
silica substrate using a CO2 laser. Applied mitigations, which are generally robust to the highest
fluences present on the NIF, can fail due to a variety of manufacturing imperfections. After multiple
recycles, final NIF optics regularly have >1000 mitigations present and therefore even low rates of
mitigation failure can be detrimental to an optics operational lifetime. Furthermore, the quantity of
mitigations makes it challenging to identify all instances of mitigation failure. This work details the
creation of an automated system that inspects mitigations for damage and the failure analysis of
mitigations fielded on the NIF. >100,000 unique mitigations were inspected, enabling a high
resolution understanding of the failure rate and providing detailed information as to potential failure
We show that the large-scale routine use of the fused silica debris shield (FSDS) maintains the ∼100× reduction in damage initiation rate and 70% increase in the install lifetime of a new grating debris shield (GDS) observed during pilot operations. Furthermore, we show that the install lifetimes of recycled GDS optics are nearly tripled using additional mitigation strategies such as expanding mitigation processing to include all damage sites larger than 10 μm (LT10) rather than just larger than 50 μm (LT50) and FSDS. We note that there is still a 50% difference between new and recycled optic installation lifetimes. We show that recycled optics have a 3.5× higher apparent initiation rate than new optics when exposed to nominally identical laser conditions.
Surface damage of silica optics routinely limits the operation of high energy laser systems. Initiated damage can grow upon additional laser pulses, eventually requiring optic removal/replacement. However, when damage is first initiated, small damage sites grow in a stochastic manner, readily parameterized by the size of the damage site, surface of residence, and the fluence and pulse duration of subsequent laser exposures. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), which exposes ~100 m2 of fused silica optics surface to high-energy-nanosecond-laser light on every full system shot, provides an ideal platform to study the growth behavior of laser-induced damage. High-resolution microscopy of individual damage sites is captured as part of the standard NIF recycling loop. However, not all damage sites are repaired depending on the age and quality of the host optic leaving many thousands sub-50-micron damages sites to resume growth after being imaged. By measuring such sites each time an optic is removed for recycling, high-resolution microscopy becomes available for many thousands of sites before and after exposure to various shot sequences on the NIF laser. Using this observed growth, a multi-shot description was fit to predict the likelihood of exit surface damage site growth under exposure from 3ω, nanosecond regime pulses for shot sequence lengths between 1-100 laser exposures. This provides a basis for accurately predicting when a recycled optic will require additional repair.
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