About four years ago I joined the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics; being apprehensive that my extensive experience in classical geometrical optics would be of little use to a laser fusion program. The Laboratory was in the early phase of building the 24 beam OMEGA laser system and it soon became evident that once again basic geometrical optics could make significant contributions to a modern new development. In this talk I will describe some of the basic optical concepts encountered during the engineering phase of building a large laser system. The optical concepts are not new but often forgotten. It illustrates again that geometrical optics takes one far down the road to solving optical problems and is used in almost every new advance in science and engineering.

Date Published: 30 December 1981
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 0288, Los Alamos Conf on Optics '81, (30 December 1981); doi: 10.1117/12.932099

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0288:
Los Alamos Conf on Optics '81
Donald H. Liebenberg, Editor(s)