Statistical relationship governing the surface damage of optical glass by wide laser radiation beams

Statistical description of laser damage initiation in NIF and LMJ Optics at 355 nm

“…[4], the authors used a power law to fit the cumulative defect density c(F) to experimental data for large areas and found good agreement with experimental results. Direct resealing of data would be much less reliable for the reasons presented above.…”

“…The cumulative defect density c(F) of ref [4] was found to vary as the m=2.5 power of fluence. It is clear from the discussion at the end of the introduction that one prefers as large a value of m as possible.…”

“…[4] used 1 micron wavelength (IR) laser pulses of 100 ns duration on K-8 glass. Of course, this is a different glass which underwent different finishing than NIF/LM.J optics.…”

“…In both of these cases, one wishes to estimate the behavior of very long cables from tests conducted on much shorter lengths. A similar approach was applied in [4] to studies of optical damage. In the present paper, we extend this approach to extrapolate small area damage test results to NIF/LMJ sized optics The paper is organized as follows.…”