A versatile control program for positioning and shooting targets in laser–plasma experiments

Abstract

We introduce a LabVIEW-based control program that significantly improves the efficiency and flexibility in positioning and shooting solid targets in laser–plasma experiments. The hardware driven by this program incorporates a target positioning subsystem and an imaging subsystem, which enables us to install up to 400 targets for one experimental campaign and precisely adjust them in six freedom degrees. The overall architecture and the working modes of the control program are demonstrated in detail. In addition, we characterized the distributions of target positions of every target holder and simultaneously saved the target images, resulting in a large dataset that can be used to train machine learning models and develop image recognition algorithms. This versatile control system has become an indispensable platform when preparing and conducting laser–plasma experiments.