Karl Wilhelmsen

National Ignition Facility system alignment

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the worlds largest optical instrument, comprising 192 37 cm square beams, each generating up to 9.6 kJ of 351 nm laser light in a 20 ns beam precisely tailored in time and spectrum. The Facility houses a massive (10 m diameter) target chamber within which the beams converge onto an ∼1 cm size target for the purpose of creating the conditions needed for deuterium/tritium nuclear fusion in a laboratory setting. A formidable challenge was building NIF to the precise requirements for beam propagation, commissioning the beam lines, and engineering systems to reliably and safely align 192 beams within the confines of a multihour shot cycle. Designing the facility to minimize drift and vibration, placing the optical components in their design locations, commissioning beam alignment, and performing precise system alignment are the key alignment accomplishments over the decade of work described herein. The design and positioning phases placed more than 3000 large (2.5 m×2 m×1 m) line-replaceable optics assemblies to within ±1 mm of design requirement. The commissioning and alignment phases validated clear apertures (no clipping) for all beam lines, and demonstrated automated laser alignment within 10 min and alignment to target chamber center within 44 min. Pointing validation system shots to flat gold-plated x-ray emitting targets showed NIF met its design requirement of ±50 μm rms beam pointing to target chamber. Finally, this paper describes the major alignment challenges faced by the NIF Project from inception to present, and how these challenges were met and solved by the NIF design and commissioning teams.

Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography - Reflective Mask Technology

EUVL mask blanks consist of a distributed Bragg reflector made of 6.7 nm-pitch bi-layers of Mo and Si deposited upon a precision Si or glass substrate. The layer deposition process has been optimized for low defects, by application of a vendor-supplied but highly modified ion-beam sputter deposition system. This system is fully automated using SMIF technology to obtain the lowest possible environmental- and handling-added defect levels. Originally designed to coat 150 mm substrates, it was upgraded in July 1999 to 200 mm and has coated runs of over 50 substrates at a time with median added defects > 100 nm below 0.05/cm2. These improvements have resulted from a number of ion-beam sputter deposition system modifications, upgrades, and operational changes, which will be discussed. Success in defect reduction is highly dependent upon defect detection, characterization, and cross- platform positional registration. We have made significant progress in adapting and extending commercial tools to this purpose, and have identified the surface scanner detection limits for different defect classes, and the signatures of false counts and non-printable scattering anomalies on the mask blank. We will present key results and how they have helped reduce added defects. The physics of defect reduction and mitigation is being investigated by a program on multilayer growth over deliberately placed perturbations (defects) of varying size. This program includes modeling of multilayer growth and modeling of defect printability. We developed a technique for depositing uniformly sized gold spheres on EUVL substrates, and have studied the suppression of the perturbations during multilayer growth under varying conditions. This work is key to determining the lower limit of critical defect size for EUV Lithography. We present key aspects of this work. We will summarize progress in all aspects of EUVL mask blank development, and present detailed results on defect reduction and mask blank performance at EUV wavelengths.

Demonstration of automated robotic workcell for hazardous waste characterization

An automated robotic workcell to classify hazardous waste stream items with previously unknown characteristics is designed, tested and demonstrated. The object attributes being quantified are radiation signature, metal content, and object orientation and volume. Multi-sensor information is used to make segregation decisions and to perform automatic grasping of objects. The workcell control program uses an off-line programming system as a server to perform both simulation control as well as actual hardware control of the workcell. The overall workcell layout, sensor specifications, workcell supervisory control, 2-D vision-based automated grasp planning, and object classification algorithms are discussed.<<ETX>>

Near Field Intensity Trends of Main Laser Alignment Images in the National Ignition Facility (NIF)

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) utilizes 192 high-energy laser beams focused with enough power and precision on a hydrogen-filled spherical, cryogenic target to potentially initiate a fusion reaction. NIF has been operational for six years and during that time, thousands of successful laser firings or shots have been executed. Critical instrument measurements and camera images are carefully recorded for each shot. The result is a massive and complex database or ‘big data’ archive that can be used to investigate the state of the laser system at any point in its history or to locate and track trends in the laser operation over time. In this study, the optical light throughput for more than 1600 NIF shots for each of the 192 main laser beams and 48 quads was measured over a three year period from January 2009 to October 2012. The purpose was to verify that the variation in the transmission of light through the optics performed within design expectations during this time period. Differences between average or integrated intensity from images recorded by the input sensor package (ISP) and by the output sensor package (OSP) in the NIF beam-line were examined. A metric is described for quantifying changes in the integrated intensity measurements. Changes in light transmission from the NIF main laser over the three year time-frame are presented.

Recent advances in automatic alignment system for the National Ignition Facility

The automatic alignment system for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a large-scale parallel system that directs all 192 laser beams along the 300-m optical path to a 50-micron focus at target chamber in less than 50 minutes. The system automatically commands 9,000 stepping motors to adjust mirrors and other optics based upon images acquired from high-resolution digital cameras viewing beams at various locations. Forty-five control loops per beamline request image processing services running on a LINUX cluster to analyze these images of the beams and references, and automatically steer the beams toward the target. This paper discusses the upgrades to the NIF automatic alignment system to handle new alignment needs and evolving requirements as related to various types of experiments performed. As NIF becomes a continuously-operated system and more experiments are performed, performance monitoring is increasingly important for maintenance and commissioning work. Data, collected during operations, is analyzed for tuning of the laser and targeting maintenance work. Handling evolving alignment and maintenance needs is expected for the planned 30-year operational life of NIF.

Evaluation of Laser Based Alignment Algorithms Under Additive Random and Diffraction Noise

The purpose of the automatic alignment algorithm at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is to determine the position of a laser beam based on the position of beam features from video images. The position information obtained is used to command motors and attenuators to adjust the beam lines to the desired position, which facilitates the alignment of all 192 beams. One of the goals of the algorithm development effort is to ascertain the performance, reliability, and uncertainty of the position measurement. This paper describes a method of evaluating the performance of algorithms using Monte Carlo simulation. In particular we show the application of this technique to the LM1_LM3 algorithm, which determines the position of a series of two beam light sources. The performance of the algorithm was evaluated for an ensemble of over 900 simulated images with varying image intensities and noise counts, as well as varying diffraction noise amplitude and frequency. The performance of the algorithm on the image data set had a tolerance well beneath the 0.5-pixel system requirement.

Image processing for the automatic alignment at the national ignition facility

The Automatic Alignment system in the National Ignition Facility is responsible for aligning 192 laser beams using camera sensor images. This paper reviews some of the image processing algorithms that generate the crucial alignment positions.

Control and Information Systems for the National Ignition Facility

Abstract Orchestration of every National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot cycle is managed by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS), which uses a scalable software architecture running code on more than 1950 front-end processors, embedded controllers, and supervisory servers. The ICCS operates laser and industrial control hardware containing 66 000 control and monitor points to ensure that all of NIF’s laser beams arrive at the target within 30 ps of each other and are aligned to a pointing accuracy of less than 50 μm root-mean-square, while ensuring that a host of diagnostic instruments record data in a few billionths of a second. NIF’s automated control subsystems are built from a common object-oriented software framework that distributes the software across the computer network and achieves interoperation between different software languages and target architectures. A large suite of business and scientific software tools supports experimental planning, experimental setup, facility configuration, and post-shot analysis. Standard business services using open-source software, commercial workflow tools, and database and messaging technologies have been developed. An information technology infrastructure consisting of servers, network devices, and storage provides the foundation for these systems. This paper is an overview of the control and information systems used to support a wide variety of experiments during the National Ignition Campaign.

Detecting objects with partial obstruction at the ARC split beam injector images at the National Ignition Facility

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) utilizes 192 beams, four of which are diverted to create the Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) by generating a sequence of short laser pulses. This ARC beam after being converted to X-rays will act as a back lighter to create a radiographic movie and provide an unprecedented insight into the imploding dynamics and serve as a diagnostic for tuning the experimental parameters to achieve fusion. One such beam is the centering beam of the pre-amplifier module which due to a split path obstructs the central square alignment fiducials. This fiducial is used for alignment and also as reference for the programmable spatial shaper (PSS) system. Image processing algorithms are used to process the images and calculate the position of various fiducials in the beam path. We discuss the algorithm to process ARC split beam injector (SBI) centering images with partial fiducial information.

Mask technology for EUV lithography

Extreme UV Lithography (EUVL) is one of the leading candidates for the next generation lithography, which will decrease critical feature size to below 100 nm within 5 years. EUVL uses 10-14 nm light as envisioned by the EUV Limited Liability Company, a consortium formed by Intel and supported by Motorola and AMD to perform R and D work at three national laboratories. Much work has already taken place, with the first prototypical cameras operational at 13.4 nm using low energy laser plasma EUV light sources to investigate issues including the source, camera, electro- mechanical and system issues, photoresists, and of course the masks. EUV lithograph masks are fundamentally different than conventional photolithographic masks as they are reflective instead of transmissive. EUV light at 13.4 nm is rapidly absorbed by most materials, thus all light transmission within the EUVL system from source to silicon wafer, including EUV reflected from the mask, is performed by multilayer mirrors in vacuum.