An ICF plant is designed to use nuclear-driven flashlamp-pumped solid-state lasers as fusion drivers. It is proposed to use a separated fission reactor with aerosol fuel to drive alkali metal excimer flashlamps as the pumping source for solid-state lasers. The first observation of nuclear-excited sodium excimer emission at 436 nm in a TRIGA reactor with 815 Torr of He-3 and 60 Torr of sodium vapor (at T = 924 K) is reported. The experiment demonstrates the feasibility of a nuclear-driven alkali metal excimer lamp. The compatibility of alkali metal excimers with different laser crystals is evaluated for driver efficiency. High overall laser efficiency ensures large fractional output power extraction from nuclear fusion by this plant. The suitability of laser crystals for the ICF plant is also presented.

10B doped diamond films grown by hot filament chemical vapor deposition were neutron irradiated at moderately high fluence levels. The as-irradiated and annealed samples, along with an unirradiated sample, were analyzed using Raman spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction. It was found that a non-diamond amorphous phase was formed on irradiation. This phase transformed back to diamond on annealing. No graphite formation was observed. A comparison with nanodiamond powder was made. A similarity between irradiated diamond films and nanocrystalline diamond powder is discussed.

Diamond films have been grown by hot filament chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on mirror-polished positively biased Si substrates. Very smooth films a few micrometers thick were obtained in only 30 min. SEM, x-ray diffraction patterns, and Raman were used to characterize the films. Not only diamond but other carbon phases, were also detected. The initial structure showed a high density of defects and large stresses. Structural changes in time were found to occur with films apparently undergoing a phase transformation.

The crystalline quality of a diamond film with two different preferential orientations (100) and (111), obtained in the same run by hot filament chemical deposition, has been studied. The quality of the film determined by Raman spectroscopy measurements was found to be nearly the same for both orientations. The second order Raman spectrum for diamond film was observed by using an infrared excitation.