Lasers and the NIF - What's It's Hard?

The NIF is a big, big stadium-sized facility at the northeast corner of Lawrence-Lirwood National Laboratory. In it, there are 192 gigantic beams that work in concert to shine a pulse of just a few nanoseconds long. At the center of this convergence of all these laser beams is a little tiny gold can. And so what happens is the laser energy is absorbed into that diamond, and it explodes.