Tandem Mirror Experiment
The Tandem Mirror Experiment was a magnetic mirror machine operated from 1979 to 1987 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The machine trapped electrons between two magnetic mirrors. Ions would collide in the center and fuse; this was an early experiment towards fusion power. The design of a magnetic mirror machine was first published in 1967; the concept was developed in the US by Richard F. Post and his team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the late sixties. Due to the 1970s energy crisis and the Cold War the funding was available for a massive magnetic mirror and magnetic bottle research program; this led to a series of machines continuing into the mid eighties. This included the 2X magnetic bottle and Baseball I, Baseball II mirror machines before the TMX was built; the TMX was formally proposed by Fred Coensgen and the Livermore team on January 12, 1977 to the US Energy Research and Development Administration. The project was projected to cost 11 million dollars; the design consisted of five rings of current around the plasma.
The ends uses shaped "Baseball" magnets at the end to stop plasma from escaping. This design produced magnetic forces that increase in every direction away from the center of the mirror region. A fusion plasma shaped like a twisted bow tie is confined inside a magnetic mirror. Designing appropriate plugs was a challenge for all magnetic mirror machines; the baseball design was replaced by the exotic yin-yang magnets of the MFTF. Problems with escaping plasma led researchers towards the Tokamak where plugs were eliminated by looping the field together; the TMX attempted to use an "ambipolar" plasma. Ideally, this allowed it to contain ions differently; because the ions are so much more massive than the electrons they can exist with different speeds simultaneously. Ideally, the TMX attempted to contain the ions with magnetic mirrors and the slow electrons by attracting them to the trapped ions. A variation on this magnetic and electrostatic confinement is being attempted in the Polywell. A summary of results from the TMX was published in February 1981.
At this time, the facility underwent a major overhaul. A thermal barrier was added to better contain the plasma, the number of rings was increased to over ten the vacuum and diagnostic system was overhauled and extra magnets were added to plug up losses; the new machine was referred to as the "TMX-U" and it operated into the late eighties. Lawrence Lidsky famously criticized the magnetic mirror machines by saying: "They kept adding one set of magnets a year until it collapsed under its own weight" and in his article "The Trouble With Fusion." "Tandem Mirror experiment with thermal barriers" G A Carlson, UCRL-52836, September 19, 1979. "Thermonuclear confinement systems with twin mirror systems" by G I Dimov, Soviet journal of plasma physics, volume 2 number 4 "Ion Losses from End-Stopped Mirror Trap" DP Chernin, MN Rosenbluth, Institute for Advanced Study, Nuclear Fusion 1978 "Improved Tandem Mirror Fusion Reactor" By D E Baldwin, Physical Review Letters, October 29, 1979
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC, is a high performance computing user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the United States Department of Energy Office of Science. As the mission computing center for the Office of Science, NERSC houses high performance computing and data systems used by 7,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities around the country. NERSC's newest and largest supercomputer is Cori, ranked 5th on the TOP500 list of world's fastest supercomputers in November 2016. NERSC is located on the main Berkeley Lab campus in California. NERSC was founded in 1974 as the Controlled Thermonuclear Research Computer Center, or CTRCC, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, The center was created to provide computing resources to the fusion energy research community and began with a Control Data Corporation 6600 computer; the first machine procured directly by the center was a CDC 7600, installed in 1975 with a peak performance of 36 megaflop/s.
In 1976, the center was renamed the National Magnetic Fusion Energy Computer Center. Subsequent supercomputers included a Cray-1, called the "c" machine, installed in May 1978, in 1985 the world's first Cray-2, the "b" machine, nicknamed "Bubbles" because of the bubbles visible in the fluid of its unique direct liquid cooling system. In 1983, the center began providing a small portion of its resources to researchers outside the fusion community; as the center supported science across many research areas, it changed its name to the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center in 1990. In 1995, the Department of Energy made the decision to move NERSC from LLNL to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A cluster of Cray J90 systems was installed in Berkeley before the main systems at Livermore were shut down for the move in 1996, thus ensuring continuous support for the research community; as part of the move, the center was renamed the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, but kept the NERSC acronym.
In 2000, NERSC moved to a new site in Oakland to accommodate the growing footprint of air-cooled supercomputers. In November 2015, NERSC is housed in Shyh Wang Hall; as with the move from LLNL, a new system was first installed in Berkeley before the machines in Oakland were taken down and moved. View the interactive timeline created in 2014 in recognition of NERSC's 40 years of HPC leadership. View the list of computer systems installed at NERSC since 1996. To reflect NERSC's mission to support scientific research, the center names its major systems after scientists; the center is located in Shyh Wang Hall, one of the nation's most energy-efficient supercomputer facilities. The building was financed by the University of California which manages Berkeley Lab for the U. S. Department of Energy; the utility infrastructure and computer systems are provided by DOE. The newest supercomputer, Cori, is named in honor of Gerty Cori, a biochemist, the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science.
Cori is a Cray XC40 system with 622,336 Intel processor cores and a theoretical peak performance of 30 petaflop/s. Cori was delivered in two phases; the first phase — known as the Data Partition — was installed in late 2015 and comprises 12 cabinets and more than 1,600 Intel Xeon "Haswell" compute nodes. It was customized to support data-intensive science and the analysis of large datasets through a combination of hardware and software configurations and queue policies; the second phase of Cori, installed in summer 2016, added another 52 cabinets and more than 9,300 nodes with second-generation Intel Xeon Phi processors, making Cori the largest supercomputing system for open science based on KNL processors. With 68 active physical cores on each KNL and 32 on each Haswell processor, Cori has 700,000 processor cores; the two phases of Cori are integrated via the Cray Aries interconnect, which has a dragonfly network topology that provides scalable bandwidth. Cori features a Burst Buffer based on the Cray DataWarp technology.
The Burst Buffer, a 1.5 PB layer of NVRAM storage, sits between compute node memory and Cori's 30-petabyte Lustre parallel scratch file system. The burst buffer provides about 1.5 TB/sec of I/O bandwidth, more than twice that of the scratch file system. NERSC has added software-defined networking features to Cori to more efficiently move data in and out of the system, giving users end-to-end connectivity and bandwidth for real-time data analysis, a real-time queue for time-sensitive analyses of data. NERSC's other large system is Edison, a Cray XC30 named in honor of American inventor and scientist Thomas Edison, which has a peak performance of 2.57 petaflop/s. Installed in 2014, Edison consists of 133,824 compute cores for running scientific applications, 357 terabytes of memory, 7.56 petabytes of online disk storage with a peak I/O bandwidth of 168 gigabytes per second. Other systems at NERSC include: PDSF, a networked distributed computing cluster designed to meet the detector simulation and data analysis requirements of physics and nuclear science collaborations.
PDSF is the longest continually operating Linux cluster in the world. Genepool, an Intel-based cluster dedicated to the computing needs of the DOE Joint Genome Institute. A 100 petabyte High Performance Storage System installation for archival storage. In use since 1998, HPSS is a modern, performance-oriented mass storage system. NERSC was one of the original developers of HPSS, along with five other DOE labs and IBM. N
Laser Inertial Fusion Energy
LIFE, short for Laser Inertial Fusion Energy, was a fusion energy effort run at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory between 2008 and 2013. LIFE aimed to develop the technologies necessary to convert the laser-driven inertial confinement fusion concept being developed in the National Ignition Facility into a practical commercial power plant, a concept known as inertial fusion energy. LIFE used the same basic concepts as NIF, but aimed to lower costs using mass-produced fuel elements, simplified maintenance, diode lasers with higher electrical efficiency. Two designs were operated as either a pure fusion or hybrid fusion-fission system. In the former, the energy generated by the fusion reactions is used directly. In the the neutrons given off by the fusion reactions are used to cause fission reactions in a surrounding blanket of uranium or other nuclear fuel, those fission events are responsible for most of the energy release. In both cases, conventional steam turbine systems are used to extract the heat and produce electricity.
Construction on NIF completed in 2009 and it began a lengthy series of run-up tests to bring it to full power. Through 2011 and into 2012, NIF ran the "national ignition campaign" to reach the point at which the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, a key goal, a basic requirement of any practical IFE system. NIF failed in this goal, with fusion performance, well below ignition levels and differing from predictions. With the problem of ignition unsolved, the LIFE project was cancelled in 2013. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been a leader in laser-driven inertial confinement fusion since the initial concept was developed by LLNL employee John Nuckols in the late 1950s; the basic idea was to use a driver to compress a small pellet known as the target that contains the fusion fuel, a mix of deuterium and tritium. If the compression reaches high enough values, fusion reactions begin to take place, releasing alpha particles and neutrons; the alphas may impact atoms in the surrounding fuel, heating them to the point where they undergo fusion as well.
If the rate of alpha heating is higher than heat losses to the environment, the result is a self-sustaining chain reaction known as ignition. Comparing the driver energy input to the fusion energy output produces a number known as fusion energy gain factor, labelled Q. A Q value of at least 1 is required for the system to produce net energy. Since some energy is needed to run the reactor, in order for there to be net electrical output, Q has to be at least 3. For commercial operation, Q values much higher. For ICF, Qs on the order of 25 to 50 are needed to recoup both the electrical generation losses and the large amount of power used to power the driver. In the fall of 1960, theoretical work carried out at LLNL suggested that gains of the required order would be possible with drivers on the order of 1 MJ. At the time, a number of different drivers were considered, but the introduction of the laser that year provided the first obvious solution with the right combination of features; the desired energies were well beyond the state of the art in laser design, so LLNL began a development program in the mid-1960s to reach these levels.
Each increase in energy led to new and unexpected optical phenomena that had to be overcome, but these were solved by the mid-1970s. Working in parallel with the laser teams, physicists studying the expected reaction using computer simulations adapted from thermonuclear bomb work developed a program known as LASNEX that suggested Q of 1 could be produced at much lower energy levels, in the kilojoule range, levels that the laser team were now able to deliver. From the late-1970s, LLNL developed a series of machines to reach the conditions being predicted by LASNEX and other simulations. With each iteration, the experimental results demonstrated; the first machine, the Shiva laser of the late 1970s, produced compression on the order of 50 to 100 times, but did not produce fusion reactions anywhere near the expected levels. The problem was traced to the issue of the infrared laser light heating electrons and mixing them in the fuel, it was suggested that using ultraviolet light would solve the problem.
This was addressed on the Nova laser of the 1980s, designed with the specific intent of producing ignition. Nova did produce large quantities of fusion, with shots producing as much as 107 neutrons, but failed to reach ignition; this was traced to the growth of Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities, which increased the required driver power. All of these problems were considered to be well understood, a much larger design emerged, NIF. NIF was designed allowing some margin of error. NIF's design was finalized in 1994, with construction to be completed by 2002. Construction began in 1997 but took over a decade to complete, with major construction being declared complete in 2009. Throughout the development of the ICF concept at LLNL and elsewhere, several small efforts had been made to consider the design of a commercial power plant based on the ICF concept. Examples include SOLASE-H and HYLIFE-II; as NIF was reaching completion in 2008, with the various concerns considered solved, LLNL began a more serious IFE development effort, LIFE.
When the LIFE project was first proposed, it focused on the nuclear fusion–fission hybrid concept, which uses the fast neutrons from the fusion reactions to induce fission in fertile nuclear materials. The hybrid concept was designed to generate power from both fertile and fissile nuclear fuel and to burn nuclear waste; the fuel blanket was designed to use TRISO-based fuel cooled by a molten salt made from a mixtu
United States federal budget
The United States federal budget comprises the spending and revenues of the U. S. federal government. The budget is the financial representation of the priorities of the government, reflecting historical debates and competing economic philosophies; the government spends on healthcare and defense programs. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office provides extensive analysis of the budget and its economic effects, it has reported that the U. S. is facing a series of long-term financial challenges, as the population of the country ages and healthcare costs continue growing faster than the economy, leading to the debt held by the public exceeding GDP by 2030. The United States has the largest external debt in the world and the 14th largest government debt as % of GDP in the world; the budget document begins with the President's proposal to Congress recommending funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1 and ending on September 30 of the year following. The fiscal year refers to the year.
However, Congress is the body required by law to pass appropriations annually and to submit funding bills passed by both houses to the President for signature. Congressional decisions are governed by rules and legislation regarding the federal budget process. Budget committees set spending limits for the House and Senate committees and for Appropriations subcommittees, which approve individual appropriations bills to allocate funding to various federal programs. If Congress fails to pass an annual budget several appropriations bills must be passed as "stop gap" measures. After Congress approves an appropriations bill, it is sent to the President, who may either sign it into law or veto it. A vetoed bill is sent back to Congress, which can pass it into law with a two-thirds majority in each legislative chamber. Congress may combine all or some appropriations bills into one omnibus reconciliation bill. In addition, the president may request and the Congress may pass supplemental appropriations bills or emergency supplemental appropriations bills.
Several government agencies provide analysis. These include the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department; these agencies have reported that the federal government is facing many important long-run financing challenges driven by an aging population, rising interest payments, spending for healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law in December 2017. CBO forecasts that the 2017 Tax Act will increase the sum of budget deficits by $2.289 trillion over the 2018-2027 decade, or $1.891 trillion after macro-economic feedback. This is in addition to the $10.1 trillion increase forecast under the CBO June 2017 current law baseline and existing $20 trillion national debt. During FY2018, the federal government spent $4.11 trillion, up $127 billion or 3.2% vs. FY2017 spending of $3.99 trillion. Spending increased for all major categories and was driven by higher spending for Social Security, net interest on the debt, defense.
Spending as % GDP fell from 20.7% GDP to 20.3% GDP, equal to the 50-year average. During FY2018, the federal government collected $3.33 trillion in tax revenue, up $14 billion or less than 1% versus FY2017. Primary receipt categories included individual income taxes, Social Security/Social Insurance taxes, corporate taxes. Corporate tax revenues 32 % due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. FY 2018 revenues were 16.4% of gross domestic product, versus 17.2% in FY 2017. Tax revenues averaged 17.4% GDP over the 1980-2017 period. Tax revenues in 2018 were about $275 billion below the CBO January 2017 forecast for 2018, indicating tax revenues would have been higher in the absence of the tax cuts; the budget deficit rose from $666 billion in FY2017 to $779 billion in FY2018, an increase of $113 billion or 17.0%. The 2018 deficit was an estimated 3.9% of GDP, up from 3.5% GDP in 2017. The historical average deficit is 2.9% GDP. During January 2017, just prior to President Trump's inauguration, CBO forecast that the FY 2018 budget deficit would be $487 billion if laws in place at that time remained in place.
The $779 billion actual result represents a $292 billion or 60% increase versus that forecast, driven by tax cuts and additional spending. The U. S. Constitution states that "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; each year, the President of the United States submits a budget request to Congress for the following fiscal year as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. Current law requires the president to submit a budget no earlier than the first Monday in January, no than the first Monday in February. Presidents submit budgets on the first Monday in February; the budget submission has been delayed, however, in some new presidents' first year when the previous president belonged to a different party. The federal budget is calculated on a cash basis; that is, revenues and outlays are recognized when transactions are made. Therefore, the full long-term costs of programs such as Medicare, Social Security, the federal portion of Medicaid are not reflected in the federal budget.
By contrast, many businesses and some other national governments have adopted forms of accrual accounting, which recogniz
Slapper detonator
A slapper detonator called exploding foil initiator, is a recent kind of a detonator developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, US Patent No. 4,788,913. It is an improvement of the earlier exploding-bridgewire detonator. All the slapper's kinetic energy is supplied only by the heating of the plasma by the current passing through it, though constructions with a "back strap" to further drive the plasma forward by magnetic field exist too; this assembly is quite efficient. The initial explosion is caused by explosive vaporization of a thin metal wire or strip, by driving several thousand amperes of electric current through it from a capacitor charged to several thousand volts; the switching may be done by a krytron. The construction consists of an explosive booster pellet, against which a disk with a hole in the center is set. Over the other side of the disk, there is a layer of an insulating film, for example, Kapton or PET film, with a thin strip of metal foil deposited on its outer side.
A narrowed section of the metal explosively vaporizes when a current pulse passes through it, which shears the mylar foil and the plasma ball pushes it through the hole, accelerating it to high speed. The impact detonates the explosive pellet. Advantages over explosive-bridgewire detonators include: The foil does not come in contact with the explosive, which reduces the risk of corrosion of the foil or chemical reactions between the foil and explosive producing unstable compounds, secondarily further reduces the risk of accidental electrical ignition of the explosive; the energy to fire the detonator is quite low The slapper pellet impacting an area of explosives rather than a single point as in an EBW is more reliable and efficient at initiating detonation. The explosive can be pressed to higher density Very insensitive explosives can be initiated directly. In a variant called laser detonator the vaporization can be caused by a high-power laser pulse delivered over-the-air or coupled by an optical fiber.
A 1-watt solid-state laser is used. The slapper detonators are used in modern weapon designs and aerospace technology. For the description of the required firing system, see Firing system for exploding-bridgewire detonator. Nuclear weapon design Triggering sequence Elements of Fission Weapon Design, section 4.1.6.2.2.6 Modelling and Simulation of Burst Phenomenon in Electrically Exploded Foils Cooper, Paul W. Explosives Engineering, New York: Wiley-VCH, 1996. ISBN 0-471-18636-8
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Prior to his presidency, he was a Hollywood actor and union leader before serving as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975. Reagan was raised in a poor family in small towns of northern Illinois, he graduated from Eureka College in 1932 and worked as a sports announcer on several regional radio stations. After moving to California in 1937, he found work as an actor and starred in a few major productions. Reagan was twice elected President of the Screen Actors Guild—the labor union for actors—where he worked to root out Communist influence. In the 1950s, he was a motivational speaker at General Electric factories. Reagan had been a Democrat until 1962, when he became a conservative and switched to the Republican Party. In 1964, Reagan's speech, "A Time for Choosing", supported Barry Goldwater's foundering presidential campaign and earned him national attention as a new conservative spokesman.
Building a network of supporters, he was elected governor of California in 1966. As governor, Reagan raised taxes, turned a state budget deficit to a surplus, challenged the protesters at the University of California, ordered in National Guard troops during a period of protest movements in 1969, was re-elected in 1970, he twice ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1968 and 1976. Four years in 1980, he won the nomination and defeated incumbent president Jimmy Carter. At 69 years, 349 days of age at the time of his first inauguration, Reagan was the oldest person to have assumed office until Donald Trump in 2017. Reagan faced former vice president Walter Mondale when he ran for re-election in 1984, defeated him, winning the most electoral votes of any U. S. president, 525, or 97.6 percent of the 538 votes in the Electoral College. This was the second-most lopsided presidential election in modern U. S. history after Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1936 victory over Alfred M. Landon, in which he won 98.5 percent or 523 of the 531 electoral votes.
Soon after taking office, Reagan began implementing sweeping new economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated tax rate reduction to spur economic growth, economic deregulation, reduction in government spending. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, spurred the War on Drugs, fought public sector labor. Over his two terms, the economy saw a reduction of inflation from 12.5% to 4.4%, an average annual growth of real GDP of 3.4%. Reagan enacted cuts in domestic discretionary spending, cut taxes, increased military spending which contributed to increased federal outlays overall after adjustment for inflation. Foreign affairs dominated his second term, including ending the Cold War, the bombing of Libya, the Iran–Iraq War, the Iran–Contra affair. In June 1987, four years after he publicly described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", Reagan challenged Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall!", during a speech at the Brandenburg Gate.
He transitioned Cold War policy from détente to rollback by escalating an arms race with the USSR while engaging in talks with Gorbachev. The talks culminated in the INF Treaty. Reagan began his presidency during the decline of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall fell just ten months after the end of his term. Germany reunified the following year, on December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed; when Reagan left office in 1989, he held an approval rating of 68 percent, matching those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, as the highest ratings for departing presidents in the modern era, he was the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to serve two full terms, after a succession of five prior presidents did not. Although he had planned an active post-presidency, Reagan disclosed in November 1994 that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease earlier that year. Afterward, his informal public appearances became more infrequent, he died at home on June 5, 2004. His tenure constituted a realignment toward conservative policies in the United States, he is an icon among conservatives.
Evaluations of his presidency among historians and the general public place him among the upper tier of American presidents. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in an apartment on the second floor of a commercial building in Tampico, Illinois, he was the younger son of Jack Reagan. Jack was a salesman and storyteller whose grandparents were Irish Catholic emigrants from County Tipperary, while Nelle was of half English and half Scottish descent. Reagan's older brother, Neil Reagan, became an advertising executive. Reagan's father nicknamed his son "Dutch", due to his "fat little Dutchman"-like appearance and "Dutchboy" haircut. Reagan's family lived in several towns and cities in Illinois, including Monmouth and Chicago. In 1919, they returned to Tampico and lived above the H. C. Pitney Variety Store until settling in Dixon. After his election as president, Reagan resided in the upstairs White House private quarters, he would quip that he was "living above the store again". Ronald Reagan wrote that his mother "always expected to find the best in people and did".
She attended the Disciples of Christ church and was active, influential, within it.
Argus laser
Argus was a two-beam high power infrared neodymium doped silica glass laser with a 20 cm output aperture built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1976 for the study of inertial confinement fusion. Argus advanced the study of laser-target interaction and paved the way for the construction of its successor, the 20 beam Shiva laser, it was known from some of the earlier experiments in ICF that when large laser systems amplified their beams beyond a certain point, nonlinear optical effects would begin to appear due to the intense nature of the light. The most serious effect among these was "Kerr lensing", because the beam is so intense, that during its passage through either air or glass the electric field of the light alters the index of refraction of the material and causes the beam at the most intense points to "self focus" down to filament like structures of high intensity; when a beam collapses into high intensity filaments like this, it can exceed the optical damage threshold of laser glass and other optics damaging them by creating pits and grey tracks through the glass.
These effects became so severe after just the first few amplification stages of early lasers, that it was seen as impossible to exceed the gigawatt level for ICF lasers without destroying the laser itself after just a few shots. In order to improve the quality of the amplified beams, LLNL had started experimenting with the use of spatial filters in the single-beam Cyclops laser, built the previous year; the basic idea was to extend the laser device into a long "beamline", over which any imperfections that accumulated in the beam would be successively removed after every amplification stage. A series of tubes with lenses on either end would focus the light down to a point where it would pass through a pinhole which would reject stray unfocused light, smoothing the beam and eliminating the high intensity spots which would have otherwise been further amplified causing damage to down-beam optics; the technique was so successful on Argus it was referred to as being "the savior of laser ICF". After the success of Cyclops in beam smoothing, the next step was to further increase the energy and power in the resulting beams.
Argus used a series of five groups of amplifiers and spatial filters arranged along the beamlines, each one boosting power until it reached a total of about 1 kilojoule and 1-2 terawatts per beam. These intensities would have been impossible to achieve without the use of spatial filtering. Argus was designed to characterize large laser beamlines and laser-target interactions, there was no attempt to achieve the fusion ignition state in the device as this was understood to be impossible at the energies Argus was capable of delivering. Argus however, was used to further explore higher yields of the so-called "exploding pusher" type targets and to develop x-ray diagnostic cameras to view the hot plasma in such targets, a technique crucial to characterization of target performance on ICF lasers. Argus was capable of producing a total of about 4 terawatts of power in short pulses of up to about 100 picoseconds, or about 2 terawatts of power in a longer 1 nanosecond pulse on a 100 micrometer diameter fusion fuel capsule target.
It became the first laser to perform experiments using X-rays produced by irradiating a hohlraum. The reduced production of hard X-ray energy via the production of hot electrons while using frequency doubled and tripled laser light was first noticed on Argus; this technique would be validated in the direct drive mode and subsequently used to enhance laser energy to target plasma coupling efficiency in experiments on nearly all subsequent laser inertial confinement devices. Argus was shut down and dismantled in September 1981. Maximum fusion yield for target implosions on Argus was about 109 neutrons per shot. Laser Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory List of laser articles List of laser types https://web.archive.org/web/20041109063036/http://www.llnl.gov/50science/lasers.html http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/16710-UOC0xx/native/16710.pdf http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978ApOpt..17..999S
