The is a high-power, 12-beam,
neodymium
Neodymium is a chemical element with the symbol Nd and atomic number 60. It is the fourth member of the lanthanide series and is considered to be one of the rare-earth metals. It is a hard, slightly malleable, silvery metal that quickly tarnishe ...
-doped glass
laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word "laser" is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The fi ...
at the
Osaka University's Institute for Laser Engineering (大阪大学レーザーエネルギー学研究センター) completed in 1983, which is used for
high energy density physics and
inertial confinement fusion
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a fusion energy process that initiates nuclear fusion reactions by compressing and heating targets filled with thermonuclear fuel. In modern machines, the targets are small spherical pellets about the size of ...
research. The name refers to the twelve individual
beamlines used to amplify the laser energy.
Unlike most other modern ICF lasers, which are
frequency tripled to the third harmonic, the GEKKO XII is only frequency doubled to 532 nm (green light). Compared to most Nd:glass laser ICF experiments, GEKKO is also quite small, with beamlines about 10 m long. The 12 beams of the GEKKO laser are capable of delivering about 10 kilojoules per 1–2 ns pulse (10–20 terawatts).
From 1996 to 1997 the GEKKO system was upgraded with a ~0.4 kJ, 0.5 PW ultra-short pulse beam which was used to investigate a promising new technique of ICF known as "
fast ignition", where the compression phase of target implosion is decoupled from the heating phase. GEKKO, using the petawatt beam for heating, along with the original beams for compression, demonstrated a
fusion yield enhancement of 3 orders of magnitude when the petawatt beam was used.
[''Nuclear fusion: Fast heating scalable to laser fusion ignition'', Kodama et al., Nature 2002]
GEKKO is currently being upgraded with the addition of a second "side-by-side" laser, the LFEX (''Laser for Fast Ignition Experiment''), part of the FIREX-1 program, in order to deliver a 10 kJ pulse of energy to a target in 10 picoseconds, further exploring the fast ignition regime.
See also
*
List of laser types
This is a list of laser types, their operational wavelengths, and their applications. Thousands of kinds of laser are known, but most of them are used only for specialized research.
Overview
Gas lasers
Chemical lasers
Used as directed-ener ...
References
{{Lasers
Inertial confinement fusion research lasers
Osaka University research