Polarization smoothing for the National Ignition Facility

Polarization smoothing (PS) is the illumination of the target with two distinct and orthogonally polarized speckle patterns. Since these two polarizations do not interfere, the intensity patterns add incoherently and thus the contrast of the intensity nonuniformity can be reduced by a factor of {radical}2 in addition to any reduction achieved by temporal smoothing techniques. Smoothing by PS is completely effective on an instantaneous basis and is therefore of particular interest for the suppression of laser plasma instabilities, which have a very rapid response time. The various implementations of PS are considered and their impact, in conjunction with temporal smoothing methods, on the spatial spectrum of the target illumination is analyzed