Absorption Rate and Uniformity in a Laser Fusion Pellet

The dependences of the absorption rate and distribution of the laser light in spherical symmetric plasmas on the focusing position and wavelength are obtained from calculations by using the ray tracing code. This technique is applied to the computation of the uniformity of the absorbed energy in a laser fusion pellet. The nonuniformity is 8∼21% for 0.35 µm wavelength laser and 15∼30% for 0.53 µm in the case of 6, 8, 12 and 20 beams. It is found that this nonuniformity originates from the overlapping of beams.