Ultrafast ´picket fence´ pulse shapes to enhance frequency conversion of ICF laser drivers

Summary form only given.Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets generally require a high-contrast UV drive pulse shape, which varies from a very low power foot at the pulse beginning to high peak power near the pulse end. As a result of frequency conversion, including /spl sim/10% transport losses to the fusion target, one obtains a high contrast pulse is typically only /spl sim/50% In the picket fence scheme, which has been discussed for many years,´ one replaces the continuous low power foot with a train of short, high-intensity square-pulse ´pickets´. Here this concept is extended to the sub-ns regime; where pickets of duration of 10-100 ps are separated by an interval of only a few 100 ps.