Beam combined IFE driver using phase controlled stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugation mirrors

Abstract

For inertial fusion energy (IFE) generation, the giant laser facilities have been constructed in the several countries. The recent laser driver technology can achieve the output energy more than 1 M-J. In addition, the recent works shows the fast ignition can reduce the required energy for the laser fusion. This seems to realize the laser fusion, but the repetition rate is not so high for obtaining the practical laser fusion energy. The beam combination laser is a promising candidate as the laser fusion driver because it can operate at the high repetition rate and it is easily scalable. In this paper, we introduce the beam combination technique using stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugate mirrors (SBS-PCMs), which was already proposed and shows the recent theoretical and experimental results about the phase controlling which is essentially required for the beam combination laser using SBS-PCMs.