https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/20135902005
Shock timing on the National Ignition Facility: The first precision tuning series
1 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA
2 Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
3 Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14423, USA
4 General Atomics, PO Box 85608, San Diego, CA 92186, USA
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
a e-mail: robey1@llnl.gov
Published online: 15 November 2013
Ignition implosions on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) [Lindl et al., Phys. Plasmas 11, 339 (2004)] are driven with a very carefully tailored sequence of four shock waves that must be timed to very high precision in order to keep the fuel on a low adiabat. The first series of precision tuning experiments on NIF have been performed. These experiments use optical diagnostics to directly measure the strength and timing of all four shocks inside the hohlraum-driven, cryogenic deuterium-filled capsule interior. The results of these experiments are presented demonstrating a significant decrease in the fuel adiabat over previously un-tuned implosions. The impact of the improved adiabat on fuel compression is confirmed in related deuterium-tritium (DT) layered capsule implosions by measurement of fuel areal density (ρR), which show the highest fuel compression (ρR ∼ 1.0 g/cm2) measured to date.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2013
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
