Microscopic characterization of bulk damage resistance of DKDP nonlinear crystals

Abstract DKDP nonlinear crystals in ICF drivers are susceptible to laser-induced bulk damage, therefore it is significant important to characterize bulk damage in order to prevent, reduce, and/or manage bulk damage. This work presents a method evaluating the bulk damage resistance of DKDP crystals, directly providing pinpoints density, size distribution, and three-dimensional (3D) distribution of pinpoints. This technique can be used for characterizing the crystal inhomogeneity, and the result demonstrates that crystal inhomogeneity have a strong and negligible impact on pinpoints density and the size distribution of pinpoints respectively, suggesting two distinct energy deposition mechanisms governing the damage initiation and the growth of the pinpoints.