Wang Yuancheng, Wang Fang, Zhang Ying, Huang Xiaoxia, Hu Dongxia, Zheng Wanguo, Zhu Rihong, Deng Xuewei
Appl Opt. 2017 Oct 10;56(29):8087-8091. doi: 10.1364/AO.56.008087.
Polarization smoothing (PS) is a key approach to suppress laser plasma instabilities (LPI) in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments. Here, we propose a liquid crystal (LC) PS element to realize single beam smoothing and demonstrate its smoothing effect, in principle, with a 2×2 LC polarization checkerboard, which reduces the laser intensity variation in the focal spot to 78.4%. LC PS elements, which have potential applications in high-power ICF laser drivers, have many advantages because they are easy to fabricate, cost effective, flexible, and large.
偏振平滑（PS）是惯性约束聚变（ICF）实验中抑制激光等离子体不稳定性（LPI）的关键方法。在此，我们提出一种液晶（LC）PS元件以实现单束光平滑，并原则上用一个2×2液晶偏振棋盘演示了其平滑效果，该元件将焦斑处的激光强度变化降低到了78.4%。液晶PS元件在高功率ICF激光驱动器中具有潜在应用，因其易于制造、成本效益高、灵活且尺寸大而具有诸多优点。
