LULI, Palaiseau, France
Cilex-Apollon is a high intensity laser facility delivering at least 5 PW pulses on targets at one shot per minute, to study physics such as laser plasma electron or ion accelerator and laser plasma X-Ray sources. Under construction, Apollon is a four beam laser installation with two target areas. To control the laser beam characteristics and alignment, more than 75 CCD cameras and 100 motors are dispatched in the facility and controlled through a Tango bus. The image acquisition and display are made at 10 Hz. Different operations are made on line, at the same rate on acquired images like binarisation, centroid calculation, size and energy of laser beam. Other operations are made off line, on stored images. The beam alignment can be operated manually or automatically. The automatic mode is based on a close loop using a transfer matrix and can correct the laser beam centering and pointing 5 times per second. The article presents the architecture, functionality, performances and feedback from a first deployment on a demonstrator.
