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Simultaneous measurement of the HT and DT fusion burn histories in inertial fusion implosions
Measuring the thermonuclear burn history is an important way to diagnose inertial fusion implosions. Here, using the gas Cherenkov detectors at the OMEGA laser facility, we measure the HT fusion burn in a H 2 +T 2 gas-fueled implosion for the first time. Then, using multiple detectors with varied Cherenkov thresholds, we demonstrate a technique for simultaneously measuring both the HT and DT burn histories from an implosion where the total reaction yields are comparable. This new technique will be used to study material mixing and kinetic phenomena in implosions.
A hybrid-drive nonisobaric-ignition scheme for inertial confinement fusion
A new hybrid-drive (HD) nonisobaric ignition scheme of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is proposed, in which a HD pressure to drive implosion dynamics increases via increasing density rather than temperature in the conventional indirect drive (ID) and direct drive (DD) approaches. In this HD (combination of ID and DD) scheme, an assembled target of a spherical hohlraum and a layered deuterium-tritium capsule inside is used. The ID lasers first drive the shock to perform a spherical symmetry implosion and produce a large-scale corona plasma. Then, the DD lasers, whose critical surface in ID corona plasma is far from the radiation ablation front, drive a supersonic electron thermal wave, which slows down to a high-pressure electron compression wave, like a snowplow, piling up the corona plasma into high density and forming a HD pressurized plateau with a large width. The HD pressure is several times the conventional ID and DD ablation pressure and launches an enhanced precursor shock and a continuous compression wave, which give rise to the HD capsule implosion dynamics in a large implosion velocity. The hydrodynamic instabilities at imploding capsule interfaces are suppressed, and the continuous HD compression wave provides main pdV work large enough to hotspot, resulting in the HD nonisobaric ignition. The ignition condition and target design based on this scheme are given theoretically and by numerical simulations. It shows that the novel scheme can significantly suppress implosion asymmetry and hydrodynamic instabilities of current isobaric hotspot ignition design, and a high-gain ICF is promising.
Direct Measurement of Ice-Ablator Interface Motion for Instability Mitigation in Indirect Drive ICF Implosions
In indirect drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF) implosions hydrodynamic instability growth at the imploding capsule ablator-DT fuel interface can reduce fuel compressibility and inject ablator into the hot spot hence reducing hot spot pressure and temperature. As a mitigation strategy, a gentle acceleration of this interface is predicted by simulations and theory to significantly reduce this instability growth in the early stage of the implosion. We have performed high-contrast, time-resolved x-ray refraction enhanced radiography (RER) to accurately measure the level of acceleration as a function of the initial laser drive time history for indirect-drive implosions on the National Ignition Facility. Here, we demonstrate a transition from no acceleration to 20 ± 1.8μm ns -2 acceleration by tweaking the drive that should reduce the initial instabilities by an order of magnitude at high modes.
Polar-direct-drive experiments with contoured-shell targets on OMEGA
Polar-driven direct-drive experiments recently performed on the OMEGA Laser System have demonstrated the efficacy of using a target with a contoured shell with varying thickness to improve the symmetry and fusion performance of the implosion. The polar-driven contoured-shell implosions have substantially reduced low mode perturbations compared to polar-driven spherical-shell implosions as diagnosed by x-ray radiographs up to shell stagnation. As a result, fusion yields were increased by more than a factor of ~2 without increasing the energy of the laser by the use of contoured shells.
Masked-backlighter technique used to simultaneously image x-ray absorption and x-ray emission from an inertial confinement fusion plasma
A method to simultaneously image both the absorption and the self-emission of an imploding inertial confinement fusion plasma has been demonstrated on the OMEGA Laser System. The technique involves the use of a high-Z backlighter, half of which is covered with a low-Z material, and a high-speed x-ray framing camera aligned to capture images backlit by this masked backlighter. Two strips of the four-strip framing camera record images backlit by the high-Z portion of the backlighter, while the other two strips record images aligned with the low-Z portion of the backlighter. The emission from the low-Z material is effectively eliminated by a high-Z filter positioned in front of the framing camera, limiting the detected backlighter emission to that of the principal emission line of the high-Z material. As a result, half of the images are of self-emission from the plasma and the other half are of self-emission plus the backlighter. The advantage of this technique is that the self-emission simultaneous with backlighter absorption is independently measured from a nearby direction. The absorption occurs only in the high-Z backlit frames and is either spatially separated from the emission or the self-emission is suppressed by filtering, or by using a backlighter much brighter than the self-emission, or by subtraction. The masked-backlighter technique has been used on the OMEGA Laser System to simultaneously measure the emission profiles and the absorption profiles of polar-driven implosions.
Polar-drive implosions on OMEGA and the National Ignition Facility
Polar-drive (PD) experiments on the OMEGA [Boehly et al., Opt. Commun. 133, 495 (1997)] laser are described. Continuous pulse shapes, where a low-power foot is followed by a rise to the main pulse, and triple-picket pulse shapes, where three pickets precede the main pulse, are used to irradiate warm plastic shell capsules. Both of these pulse shapes set the target on a low, ignition-relevant adiabat of ∼3.5. The areal density is modeled very well in these implosions indicating that shock timing is well modeled in PD geometry. It is shown that the symmetry can be predictably varied by changing the beam pointings. Symmetry is also well reproduced across the two pulse shapes. Limitations of OMEGA experiments are discussed. Preliminary designs for PD implosion experiments on the NIF, with the goal of addressing ignition-relevant issues for PD, including symmetry are presented.
Bragg diffraction using a 100ps 17.5 keV x-ray backlighter and the Bragg Diffraction Imager
A new diagnostic for measuring Bragg diffraction from a laser-driven crystal using a 100ps 17.5 kV x-ray backlighter source is designed and tested successfully at the Omega EP laser facility on static Mo and Ta single crystal samples using a Mo Ka backlighter. The Bragg Diffraction Imager (BDI) consists of a heavily shielded enclosure and a precisely positioned beam block, attached to the main enclosure by an Aluminum arm. Image plate is used as the x-ray detector. The diffraction lines from Mo and Ta <222> planes are clearly detected with a high signal-to-noise using the 17.5 keV and 19.6 keV characteristic lines generated by a petawatt-driven Mo foil. This technique will be applied to shock and ramp-loaded single crystals on the Omega EP laser. Pulsed x-ray diffraction of shock- and ramp-compressed materials is an exciting new technique that can give insight into the dynamic behavior of materials at ultra-high pressure not achievable by any other means to date. X-ray diffraction can be used to determine not only the phase and compression of the lattice at high pressure, but by probing the lattice compression on a timescale equal to the 3D relaxation time of the material, information about dislocation mechanics, including dislocation multiplication rate and velocity, can also be derived. Both Bragg, or reflection, and Laue, or transmission, diffraction have been developed for shock-loaded low-Z crystalline structures such as Cu, Fe, and Si using nano-second scale low-energy implosion and He-{alpha} x-ray backlighters. However, higher-Z materials require higher x-ray probe energies to penetrate the samples, such as in Laue, or probe deep enough into the target, as in the case of Bragg diffraction. Petawatt laser-generated K{alpha} x-ray backlighters have been developed for use in high-energy radiography of dense targets and other HED applications requiring picosecond-scale burst of hard x-rays. While short pulse lasers are very efficient at producing high-energy x-rays, the characteristic x-rays produced in these thin foil targets are superimposed on a broad bremsstrahlung background and can easily saturate a detector if careful diagnostic shielding and experimental geometry are not implemented. A new diagnostic has been designed to measure Bragg diffraction from laser-driven crystal targets using characteristic x-rays from a short-pulse laser backlighter on the Omega EP laser. The Bragg Diffraction Imager, or BDI, is a TIM-mounted instrument consisting of a heavily shielded enclosure made from 3/8-inch thick Heavymet (W-Fe-Ni alloy) and a precisely positioned beam bock, attached to the main enclosure by an Aluminum arm. The beam block is made of 1-inch thick, Al-coated Heavymet and serves to block the x-rays directly from the petawatt backlight, while allowing the diffraction x-rays from the crystal to pass to the enclosure. A schematic of the BDI is shown in Fig. 1a. Image plates are used as the x-ray detector and are loaded through the top of the diagnostic in an Aluminum, light-tight cartridge. The front of the enclosure can be fitted with various filters to maximize the diffraction signal-to-noise.
Wavelength-detuning cross-beam energy transfer mitigation scheme for direct drive: Modeling and evidence from National Ignition Facility implosions
Here, cross-beam energy transfer (CBET) results from two-beam energy exchange via seeded stimulated Brillouin scattering, which detrimentally reduces laser-energy absorption for direct-drive inertial confinement fusion. Consequently, ablation pressure and implosion velocity suffer from the decreased absorption, reducing target performance in both symmetric and polar direct drive. Additionally, CBET alters the time-resolved scattered-light spectra and redistributes absorbed and scattered-light–changing shell morphology and low-mode drive symmetry. Mitigating CBET is demonstrated in inertial confinement implosions at the National Ignition Facility by detuning the laser-source wavelengths (±2.3 Å UV) of the interacting beams. In polar direct drive, wavelength detuning was shown to increase the equatorial region velocity experimentally by 16% and to alter the in-flight shell morphology. These experimental observations are consistent with design predictions of radiation–hydrodynamic simulations that indicate a 10% increase in the average ablation pressure. These results indicate that wavelength detuning successfully mitigates CBET. Simulations predict that optimized phase plates and wavelength-detuning CBET mitigation utilizing the three-legged beam layout of the OMEGA Laser System significantly increase absorption and achieve >100-Gbar hot-spot pressures in symmetric direct drive.
Ab initio determination of the instability growth rate of warm dense beryllium-deuterium interface
Accurate knowledge about the interfacial unstable growth is of great importance in inertial confinement fusion. During implosions, the deuterium-tritium capsule is driven by laser beams or X-rays to access the strongly coupled and partially degenerated warm dense matter regime. At this stage, the effects of dissipative processes, such as diffusion and viscosity, have significant impact on the instability growth rates. Here, we present ab initio molecular dynamics simulations to determine the equations of state and the transport coefficients. Several models are used to estimate the reduction in the growth rate dispersion curves of Rayleigh-Taylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities with considering the presence of these dissipative effects. We show that these instability growth rates are effectively reduced when considering diffusion. The findings provide significant insights into the microscopic mechanism of the instability growth at the ablator-fuel interface and will refine the models used in the laser-driven hydrodynamic instability experiments.
High-resolution x-ray radiography with Fresnel zone plates on the University of Rochester’s OMEGA Laser Systems
Experiments performed at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics with a continuous-wave (cw) x-ray source and on the OMEGA and OMEGA EP Laser Systems have utilized a Fresnel zone plate (FZP) to obtain x-ray images with a spatial resolution as small as ~1.5 μm. Such FZP images were obtained with a charge-coupled device or a framing camera at energies ranging from 4.5 keV to 6.7 keV using x-ray line emission from both the cw source and high-intensity, laser-beam–illuminated metal foils. In all cases, the resolution test results are determined from patterns and grids backlit by these sources. Here, the resolutions obtained are shown to be due to a combination of the spectral content of the x-ray sources and detector resolution limited by the magnification of the images (14× to 22×). High-speed framing cameras were used to obtain FZP images with frame times as short as ~30 ps. Double-shell implosions on OMEGA were backlit by laser-irradiated Fe foils, thus obtaining a framing-camera–limited, FZP-image resolution of ~3 μm–4 μm.
Using statistical modeling to predict and understand fusion experiments
Over 300 cryogenic layered direct-drive inertial confinement fusion implosions have been successfully executed on the OMEGA Laser System in the last decade. However, extracting sufficient understanding from these experiments to develop new designs or to identify or mitigate degradation sources remains challenging. Recently, a statistical modeling approach was developed to successfully design and predict improved implosion experiments on OMEGA. Here, we show that one-dimensional simulations can be used to predict the outcomes of systematically perturbed three-dimensional simulations and that this statistical modeling approach can be used to identify or rule out physical mechanisms for some of the degradation sources observed on the OMEGA Laser System for direct-drive cryogenic inertial confinement fusion. In this instance, we investigate the fusion yield dependencies on the ion temperature asymmetries and laser beam size observed in experiments by comparing with trends in three-dimensional synthetic simulation databases. Using the statistical model on these systematically perturbed simulations, we find that the statistically inferred dependency on the measured ion temperature asymmetries is well explained by imposed ℓ =1 modes. However, we find that the dependency on the laser beam size is only dominated by the illumination non-uniformity for some extreme cases.
Knock-on deuteron imaging for diagnosing the morphology of an ICF implosion at OMEGA
Knock-on deuteron imaging is a new diagnostic technique that is being implemented at the OMEGA laser facility to diagnose the morphology of an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) implosion. It utilizes the fact that some of the neutrons from deuterium–tritium (DT)-fusion reactions generated in the central hot-spot of an ICF implosion elastically scatter deuterons as they traverse the surrounding shell layer. The energy of these “knock-on” deuterons depends on the scattering angle, where the most energetic deuterons are forward-scattered and probe the shape of the central hot-spot, while lower-energy deuterons are made by side-scattering or slowing down in the fuel and carry information about the distribution of the dense DT-fuel layer surrounding the hot-spot. The first proof-of-concept tests have been conducted successfully. In these tests, three penumbral imagers with different views on an implosion recorded deuterons scattered from the dense shell of DT-gas-filled deuterated plastic shell implosions with prescribed offsets. Data from these experiments are presented here, along with novel analysis techniques that iteratively reconstruct the deuteron source from the data. Reconstructed hot-spot and shell radii agree with 1D hydro simulations and indicate a P1 asymmetry in the direction of the offset. A comparison of coaxial deuteron and x-ray images suggests the presence of a mix between the hot-spot and shell on the order of 15 μm. This new diagnostic capability will allow us to study asymmetries in unprecedented detail at OMEGA.
The National Direct-Drive Program: OMEGA to the National Ignition Facility
The goal of the National Direct-Drive Program is to demonstrate and understand the physics of laser direct drive (LDD). Efforts are underway on OMEGA for the 100-Gbar Campaign to demonstrate and understand the physics for hot-spot conditions and formation relevant for ignition at the 1-MJ scale, and at the National Ignition Facility to develop an understanding of the direct-drive physics at long scale lengths for the MJ Direct-Drive Campaign. For this paper the strategy of the National Direct-Drive Program is described; the requirements for the DT cryogenic fill-tube target being developed for OMEGA are presented; and preliminary LDD implosion measurements of hydrodynamic mixing seeded by laser imprint, the target-mounting stalk, and microscopic surface debris are reported.
Optical Test Bench (SYSM 5620 Final Report)
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a research facility that focuses on High Energy Density Science and Inertial Confinement Fusion. In the NIF, 192 laser beams are directed into a miniscule Target Capsule to generate an implosion – this is called a NIF Shot. Many NIF Users conduct experiments using different Targets and laser inputs to generate reactions that are of interest to the scientific community. Those reactions are monitored using various Target Diagnostic instruments, including Shot Time Photography – which provides crucial images of the Target as the implosion occurs. A subset of these NIF Users is less interested in the reaction itself and more interested in subjecting materials or devices to the intense environment that these reactions can create. Using the Target as a source of x-rays, neutrons, or blast loading for particular materials has been significant to the shock physics community and to those who work in extreme design spaces. However, the Material and Radiation Effects team – that performs these experiments on behalf of the NIF Users – has not been able to make good use of the existing Shot Time Photography Diagnostics. The STP cameras are focused on the Targets rather than the MRE Customers’ materials, the current system is not oriented to have a good view of the MRE Customers’ materials, and the cameras are limited in their capabilities (black and white, poor resolution, etc.). As MRE experiments increase in quantity and importance to the scientific community, the desire for visual monitoring of the experiments to substantiate models and inform other data is also rising.
Hydrodynamic instability growth and mix experiments at the National Ignition Facility
Hydrodynamic instability growth and its effects on implosion performance were studied at the National Ignition Facility [G. H. Miller, E. I. Moses, and C. R. Wuest, Opt. Eng. 443, 2841 (2004)]. Implosion performance and mix have been measured at peak compression using plastic shells filled with tritium gas and containing embedded localized carbon-deuterium diagnostic layers in various locations in the ablator. Neutron yield and ion temperature of the deuterium-tritium fusion reactions were used as a measure of shell-gas mix, while neutron yield of the tritium-tritium fusion reaction was used as a measure of implosion performance. The results have indicated that the low-mode hydrodynamic instabilities due to surface roughness were the primary culprits for yield degradation, with atomic ablator-gas mix playing a secondary role. In addition, spherical shells with pre-imposed 2D modulations were used to measure instability growth in the acceleration phase of the implosions. The capsules were imploded using ignition-relevant laser pulses, and ablation-front modulation growth was measured using x-ray radiography for a shell convergence ratio of ∼2. The measured growth was in good agreement with that predicted, thus validating simulations for the fastest growing modulations with mode numbers up to 90 in the acceleration phase. Future experiments will be focused on measurements at higher convergence, higher-mode number modulations, and growth occurring during the deceleration phase.
Diagnosis of the imploding shell asymmetry in polar-direct-drive deuterium–tritium cryogenic target implosions on OMEGA
We discuss the analyses of gated, x-ray imaging data from polar-direct-drive experiments with cryogenically layered deuterium–tritium targets on the OMEGA laser. The in-flight shell asymmetries were diagnosed at various times during the implosion, which was caused by the beam pointing geometry and preimposed variations in the energy partition between the different groups of laser beams. The shape of the ablation surface during the acceleration phase of the implosion was measured along two different lines of sight, and a Legendre mode (ℓ-mode) decomposition was applied for modes of up to ten to investigate shell asymmetries. A clear causal relationship between the imposed beam imbalance and the shape of the in-flight shell asymmetries was observed. The imploded shell with a balanced energy ratio shows smaller values of the amplitudes of ℓ-mode 2 compared to that from implosions with an imbalanced ring energy ratio. The amplitudes of ℓ-modes 4 and 6 are the same within the measurement uncertainty with respect to the change in beam energy ratio.
The importance of electrothermal terms in Ohm's law for magnetized spherical implosions
The magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) of magnetic-field compression in laser-driven spherical targets is considered. Magnetic-field evolution is cast in terms of an effective fluid velocity, a convective term resulting from resistivity gradients, a resistive diffusion term, and a source term. Effective velocity is the sum of fluid velocity, drift velocity, and heat-flux velocity, given by electron heat flux divided by electron enthalpy density, which has two components: the perpendicular or Nernst velocity and the cross-field velocity. The Nernst velocity compresses the magnetic field as the heat front moves into gas. The cross-field velocity leads to dynamo generation of an azimuthal magnetic field. It is proposed that the heat-flux velocity should be flux limited using a “Nernst” flux limiter independent of the thermal flux limiter but should not exceed it. The addition of the MHD routines to the 1D, Lagrangian hydrocode LILAC and the Eulerian version of the 2D hydrocode DRACO is described, and the codes are used to model a magnetized spherical compression on the OMEGA laser. Thermal flux limiting at a shock front is found to cause unphysical electron temperature gradients that lead to large, unphysical magnetic fields caused by the resistivity gradient, so thermal flux limiting in the gas is removed. The Nernst term reduces the benefits of magnetization in inertial fusion. A Nernst flux limiter ≤0.12 is required in the gas in order to agree with measured neutron yield and increases in the neutron-averaged ion temperature caused by magnetization. This corresponds to preventing the Nernst velocity from exceeding the shock velocity, which prevents significant decoupling of the magnetic field and gas compression.