NIF — one shot from master oscillator to target
A pulsed master laser is split through a beamsplitter cascade into eleven equal-power ports, each with its own delay line, EOM, and amplifier proxy, timed so all eleven pulses arrive on one target within a fraction of a nanosecond of each other — loosely inspired by the National Ignition Facility's beam architecture. Caution: this is a schematic illustration, not an accurate model of a real NIF shot — the amplifier stages in particular are simplified passive proxies, not a real gain chain. The real facility (see lasers.llnl.gov, and specifically lasers.llnl.gov/lighting-beam-path) amplifies its laser light more than 10 billion times, splits it into 192 individual beams rather than eleven, converts each beam's wavelength from infrared to ultraviolet in transport, and converges them with pinpoint accuracy on a hohlraum target inside the Target Chamber at up to millions of joules and hundreds of terawatts — culminating in the December 2022 shot that produced more fusion energy (3.15 MJ) than the 2.05 MJ of laser energy that drove it. This setup only illustrates the timing-and-convergence geometry, nothing more.
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