A multi-beam alignment method is proposed to reduce the total time for aligning at the target area all the laser beams of an ICF laser facility. A number of sub-areas with invariant size and position are extracted from the image acquired by the alignment sensor. An alignment route is comprised of a certain part of those sub-areas, and several alignment routes can cover all the sub-areas. The invariant layout of the sub-areas and the alignment routes is called an invariant sub-area configuration of the alignment sensor. The focused spots of the alignment beams are adjusted in a specific sequence along the alignment routes, and finally reach the desired position on the alignment sensor. The adjustment of all the spots inside each sub-areas is carried out concurrently, and the adjustment along one route for a spot moving from one sub-area into the next sub-area is carried out consecutively. The estimated total time for aligning all the laser beams at target area shows that the proposed multi-beam alignment method has a much higher efficiency.

Date Published: 3 February 2015
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9255, XX International Symposium on High-Power Laser Systems and Applications 2014, 92554D (3 February 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2065226

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9255:
XX International Symposium on High-Power Laser Systems and Applications 2014
Chun Tang; Shu Chen; Xiaolin Tang, Editor(s)