Modeling KDP bulk damage curves for prediction of large-area damage performance

Over the past tow years extensive experiments has been carried out to determine the nature of bulk damage in KDP. Automated damage testing with small beams has made it possible to rapidly investigate damage statistics and its connection to growth parameter variation. Over this time we have built up an encyclopedia of many damage curves but only relatively few samples have been tested with large beams. The scarcity of data makes it difficult to estimate how future crystal will perform on the NIF, and the campaign nature of large beam testing is not suitable for efficient testing of many samples with rapid turn-around. It is therefore desirable to have analytical tools in place that could make reliable predictions of large-beam performance based on small-beam damage probability measurements. To that end, we discuss the application of exponential and power law damage evolution within the framework of Poisson statistics in this memo. We describe the result of fitting these models to various damage probability curves on KDP including the heavily investigated KDP214 samples.

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