The National Ignition Facility (NIF) and Photon
Science principal directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) carries out
key programs and technologies that support the U.S. Department of Energy’s
National Nuclear Security Administration Office of Defense Programs and LLNL missions
of ensuring that the nation’s nuclear weapons remain safe, secure, and reliable.
The directorate is a preeminent center for developing and applying cutting-edge
laser and optics technologies to missions in national and global security, energy research,
and scientific exploration.
The NIF is a stadium-sized 192-beam facility containing
the world’s largest and most energetic laser. High-energy NIF laser experiments are
attaining unprecedented conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. Access
to these regimes will help enable scientists to validate computer models that predict the
capabilities of our nation’s nuclear stockpile, provide the basis for evaluating future decisions about environmentally attractive and virtually inexhaustible fusion energy, and make possible new areas of basic science and applied physics research. With these capabilities,
NIF will become a premier international center for experimental science early in
the next decade.
The National Ignition Campaign includes all of the experiments,
hardware, and infrastructure needed to execute the initial ignition and
thermonuclear experiments on NIF and to continue research on ignition in the following
years. Key elements of the National Ignition Campaign include target physics concept
validation and equipment such as diagnostics and the cryogenic target system required
for ignition experiments.