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The role of the shielding on the Streak Camera is critical to the project. To achieve the performance required for the fusion project, magnetic fields originating from outside the streak camera must be reduced by a factor of 1000 within the instrument. Mr. Boni states the magnetic shielding provided by Magnetic Shield Corporation allowed them to achieve the necessary accuracy.
The function of the Streak Camera is to time resolve an extremely fast pulse of light or X-ray. The instrument can see a sub-billionth of a second pulse of light. Streak cameras are sometimes called optical oscilloscopes, because the final output from a streak camera looks like an oscilloscope, signal amplitude versus time.
The camera measures the progress of the brightness - is it a slow ramp up then a burst, or a single burst of maximum intensity or some other phenomenon?
(TOP) A view of the OMEGA target bay from high above the target chamber shows critical components associated with
the UV transport system.
(BOTTOM) View of target shot in the OMEGA target chamber.
The earliest models employed a strip of film behind a lens coupled to a streak camera. Today, CCD cameras are coupled to the streak cameras to record the event and translate the data to electronic signals that can be stored, retrieved, reviewed and displayed on a variety of instruments and analytic equipment.
It is the review function that most interests Mr. Boni and his colleagues at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He describes their activities reviewing the camera's data as analogous to smashing a wrist watch against the table so all the parts fly out, then taking a snapshot to freeze the pieces in mid-air, and trying to determine how the watch worked by examining the pieces. They are trying to understand the physics of Fusion by studying the path and actions of the particles.
Definitely not something for the impatient-minded individual. But the payback is critical to the survival of the world. As Mr. Boni says, "We will run out of [inexpensive] fossil fuel at some time in the future. When we do, Fusion may be the energy source to replace it. We believe it will be, and that we are creating the future of mankind."
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