Fig. 1. Laser pulses for (a) fast ignition and (b) shock ignition. In both cases, the compression pulse is preceded by an adiabatic shaping picket (of 100–200 ps duration) from Ref. [22].

Fig. 2. Top left: each beamlet has a phase plate to create a speckle pattern inside the focal spot. Bottom left: many beamlets overlap to smooth the focal spot. Right: introduction of adequate timing between beamlets leads to optical zooming; the spot size is changing during the pulse.

Fig. 3. Design of two diode-pumped amplifiers from Ref. [25]. The left is Mercury-like^[26] and/or Dipole-like^[27] and the right is Lucia-like^[28].

Fig. 4. Evolution of laser output power versus year for some DPSSLs: Mercury^[26], SSHCL^[37], Textron^[38], JHPSSL^[36] and also four combined fiber lasers^[59]. Also shown is one commercially available multimode fiber laser system^[60].