THIS PROJECT AIMS TO ADVANCE THE UNDERSTANDING OF THE OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF PLASMA AND USE THAT UNDERSTANDING TO DEVELOP COMPACT PLASMA-BASED OPTICAL COMPONENTS FOR HIGH-POWER LASERS. TO STUDY PLASMA OPTICS IN A ROBUST WAY, THIS PROJECT WILL COMBINE EXPERIMENTAL HARDWARE AND A SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK THAT ALLOW HIGH-REPETITION-RATE EXPERIMENTS AND EFFICIENT EXAMINATION OF LARGE PARAMETER SPACES, WITH A GOAL OF DEVELOPING GENERALIZED TOOLS FOR CONDUCTING HIGH-REPETITION-RATE HIGH-ENERGY-DENSITY SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS. ULTIMATELY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY WILL TRY TO INCREASE THE VIABILITY OF PLASMA OPTICS AS OPTICAL COMPONENTS BY USING ADAPTIVE EXPERIMENTS AND SIMULATIONS TO IMPROVE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LASER-INDUCED PLASMA STRUCTURES AND NONLINEAR PLASMA OPTICS, DEVELOP METHODS FOR CONTROL OF OPTICALLY INDUCED PLASMAS, AND EXPLORE THE DYNAMICS OF COMPLEX PLASMA STRUCTURES IN HIGH-INTENSITY ENVIRONMENTS.