And in July 2012, we shot the first hohlraum at 1.9 MJ and 430 TW. “Since the completion of the National Ignition Facility Project in March 2009,” said Bruno Van Wonterghem, NIF facility manager, “we have continuously increased the energy and power over a few years to make sure that we were obtaining the regime where implosion experiments could take place in relevant conditions. Opened for experiments in 2009, NIF’s original design specification was to deliver 1.8 MJ of ultraviolet energy with a peak power of 500 terawatts (TW). Boosting laser performanceįrom their inception as a single weak pulse of light in the Master Oscillator Room (MOR), NIF’s high-energy laser beams travel nearly 5,000 feet in just five microseconds, bounding along a route that crisscrosses the length of three football fields before emerging as a powerful blast of energy when they impact the target.Īlong their journey, the beams pass through about 7,500 large half-meter-sized optics and 26,000 smaller ones that amplify their energy and direct them to a pencil-eraser-sized target, called a hohlraum, inside the target chamber. Master Oscillator Room staff members Chris Kinsella (left) and Matt Prantil (right) install hardware as part of an upgrade that improved the fidelity of NIF’s pulse-shaping capabilities. “It’s quite a grand challenge to do that because the laser architecture is extremely complex and a marvel of laser physics, engineering and optics manufacturing,” Di Nicola said. This impressive combination of power and finesse, built and refined over several decades of effort by generations of NIF & Photon Science laser scientists and engineers, gave NIF the capability to achieve its long-sought goal of conducting a thermonuclear fusion experiment that reached ignition and exceeded scientific “break-even” - producing more fusion energy than the amount of laser energy used to drive the target (see “ Star power: Blazing the path to fusion ignition ”). We need to have finesse and make sure that we deliver that energy with exquisite accuracy.” “NIF is a big hammer, it’s extremely energetic,” said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, NIF’s chief systems engineer for laser systems. The designers also were able to further fine-tune how this energy interacted with the peppercorn-sized target capsule through meticulous adjustments in the laser beams’ wavelengths (see “ Designing for ignition: Precise changes yield historic results ”). 8, 2021, experiment that brought NIF to the threshold of ignition. This was 8% more than the 1.9 MJ that was available for the Aug. To reach that historic milestone, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists took advantage of a modest increase in NIF’s laser energy output to 2.05 megajoules (million joules, or MJ) of ultraviolet energy. 5, 2022, the National Ignition Facility (NIF)’s laser system needed to operate flawlessly at both ends of the performance spectrum, delivering immense energies while controlling the energy balance across all 192 laser beams with extreme precision. Nuclear, Chemical and Isotopic Science and Technologyįourth in a series of articles describing the elements of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's fusion breakthrough. Lasers and Optical Science and Technology.The new feature is part of the company’s $50 per month (or $239 per year) Glowforge Premium subscription, and Magic Canvas is available on all models starting today. The company has applied for patents related to its Magic Canvas software, and the team was reluctant to share specific details about which exact latent diffusion neural network it’s using to generate its made-for-laser-engraving AI artworks. We’re able to use modern AI technology to provide the solution: a supercomputer in the cloud, creating artwork just for you.” “It’s already easy to create with your Glowforge, so the last barrier was the hardest: how to bring your idea to life quickly, without complex tools. We’ve been working with cutting-edge artificial intelligence research to find a new way to do that, and today, we’re proud to unveil Magic Canvas to the world,” said Shapiro. At Glowforge, we help our customers print beautiful, physical products, quickly and easily - to bring their ideas to life. “After years of research, Generative AI is finally bearing results.
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