The architecture and major system components of the sodium-layer kw guide star system at LLNL will be described, and experimental results reported. The subsystems include the laser system, the beam delivery system including a pulse stretcher and beam pointing control, the beam director, and the telescope with its adaptive-optics package. The laser system is one developed for the Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation (AVLIS) Program. This laser system can be configured in various ways in support of the AVLIS program objectives, and was made available to the guide star program at intermittent times on a non-interference basis. The first light transmitted into the sky was in July of 1992, at a power level of 1. 1 kW. The laser pulse width is about 32 ns, and the pulse repetition rate was 26 kHz for the 1. 1 kW configuration and 13 kHz for a 400 W configuration. The laser linewidth is tailored to match the sodium D{sub 2} absorption line, and the laser system has active control of beam pointing and wavefront quality. Because of the short pulse length the sodium transition is saturated and the laser power is not efficiently utilized. For this reason a pulse stretcher was developed, …

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Sandia National Laboratories/California have jointly constructed a new stand-alone microprobe facility. Although the facility was built to develop a method to rapidly locate and determine elemental concentrations of micron scale particulates on various media using PIXE, the facility has found numerous applications in biology and materials science. The facility is located at LLNL and uses a General Ionex Corporation Model 358 duoplasmatron negative ion source, a National Electrostatics Corporation 5SDH-2 tandem accelerator, and an Oxford triplet lens. Features of the system include complete computer control of the beam transport using LabVIEW^TM for Macintosh, computer controlled beam collimating and divergence limiting slits, automated sample positioning to micron resolution, and video optics for beam positioning and sample observation. Data collection is accomplished with the simultaneous use of as many as four EG&G Ortec IGLET-X^TM X-Ray detectors, digital amplifiers made by X-Ray Instruments and Associates (XIA), and LabVIEW^TM for Macintosh acquisition software.