Summary form only given.

The preamplifier module or PAM is a high gain, Nd:glass laser

system that amplifies the temporally and frequency formatted pulse produced in the master
oscillator room (MOR), up to a level that is sufficient for seeding the main amplifier chains of
the NIF laser system. The PAM consists of two separate laser amplifiers, a diode-pumped,
regenerative amplifier, and a 5 cm., flashlamp-pumped-rod, four-pass amplifier. The
amplifiers boost the 1 nJ input pulse from the MOR up to 10-20 Joules in a pulse that
ranges from 0.2 to 20 ns. In addition to amplification, the PAM spatially shapes the beam to
precompensate for the spatial gain profiles of the main amplifiers, and angularly disperses
the beam as part of the smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD) feature of the laser system.
In the past we have demonstrated the performance specifications of the preamplifier on a
tabletop, development system. We assembled the first engineering prototype PAM and are
conducting final measurements on a system that will become the first of 48 PAMs in the NIF
laser system. We made improvements to various subsystems in the PAM that are now
included in the engineering prototype. We now operate the regenerative amplifier in energy
saturation to reduce the pulse-to-pulse variation in the PAM. We improved the efficiency of
the spatial beam shaping masks by including the effects of diffraction from the chrome
pixels in designing the masks. We eliminated temporal pulse overlap in the four-pass
amplifier by lengthening the relay telescopes in the four-pass optical layout. In the
presentation we discuss the latest results from performance measurements of PAM
engineering prototype.
The desired parameters of the HEHP laser system are laser pulses of 1 kJ in long ~ 3
nanosecond pulses or alterna-tively pulses of ultra-high peak power ~0.3 petawatt for
focused intensities exceeding 1020 W/cm2.

the system comprises two independent front-ends, a nano-second front-end for pulses of
1 to 20 nanosecond duration with selectable pulse shape

The nanosecond front-end is entirely fiber based which makes it a very compact system
without further need for alignment. An attractive feature is the possibility to generate
arbitrary temporal pulse shapes with rise times of less than 100 ps by means of a fiber
based amplitude modulator section in combination with an arbitrary waveform generator,
making it a versatile front-end for a variety of experimental needs.

A Nd:glass ring regenerative amplifier amplifies the pulses to the energy level of 50 mJ
required for further amplification by the preamplifier module.