LLNL’s Eyal Feigenbaum received the Alexander Glass Best Oral Presentation Award from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He was recognized for his talk, “Revisiting the laser induced filamentation damage conditions in fused silica for energetic laser systems,” at the Laser Damage 2018 conference.
The work he presented studies the conditions leading to the formation of filamentation damage in a bulk of optics — an angel hair-like shaped damage. This problem limits the potential of high-power lasers like NIF from reaching higher powers as well as their optics’ lifetime. Filamentation formation is well-studied in small beams, but the problem is fundamentally different with NIF and other high-power lasers.
“To better understand the contributing parameters and their role, we derived an analytic model and examined it with numerical simulation of the problem,” explained Feigenbaum. “The model results highlight the role of the major contributing parameters and results in a guidance for mitigations of filamentation damage. We are now focusing on further verifying the model findings and the proposed mitigations.”
At the Laser Damage 2019 conference, held in September in Broomfield, Colorado, Feigenbaum received a personalized desktop trophy and an honorarium as a token of SPIE’s appreciation for his contributions to the conference.