The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's largest laser system. It contains a 192 beam neodymium glass laser that is designed to deliver 1.8 MJ at 500 TW at 351 nm in order to achieve energy gain (ignition) in a deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion target. To meet this goal, laser design criteria include the ability to generate pulses of up to 1.8 MJ total energy, with peak power of 500 TW and temporal pulse shapes spanning 2 orders of magnitude at the third harmonic (351 nm or 3omega) of the laser wavelength. The focal-spot fluence distribution of these pulses is carefully controlled, through a combination of special optics in the 1omega (1053 nm) portion of the laser (continuous phase plates), smoothing by spectral dispersion, and the overlapping of multiple beams with orthogonal polarization (polarization smoothing). We report performance qualification tests of the first eight beams of the NIF laser. Measurements are reported at both 1omega and 3omega, both with and without focal-spot conditioning. When scaled to full 192 beam operation, these results demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, that the NIF will meet its laser performance design criteria, and that the NIF can simultaneously meet the temporal pulse shaping, focal-spot conditioning, and peak power requirements for two candidate indirect drive ignition designs.

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In order for step and flash imprint lithography (S-FIL) to become a truly viable manufacturing technology, infrastructure including template repair must be commercially available. Extensive template repair studies were undertaken using RAVE's nm 650 tool which is predicated on an AFM platform and relies upon a nanomachining technique for opaque defect removal. On S-FIL templates, the standard deviation for depth repairs in quartz from the target depth was found to be 3.1 nm ͑1͒. At 21.5 nm ͑1͒, the analogous spread in edge placement data for opaque line protrusions was somewhat higher. Trench cuts through lines were successfully created with a minimum size of about 55 nm. The effectiveness of the repairs on the template was verified by imprinting experiments. The range of depth offsets studied ͑−15 to + 15 nm͒ had no bearing on the imprinting process. The edge placement on wafers virtually mirrored the edge placement of the repaired templates. Connections between features which were created by trench cuts on the template were filled with the imprint monomer and measured slightly larger than the minimum gap size. Finally, imprinted wafers were used to pattern transfer features into 100 nm of oxide.

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