Precision Shock Tuning on the National Ignition Facility

Ignition implosions on the National Ignition Facility [J. D. Lindl et al., Phys. Plasmas 11, 339 (2004)] are underway with the goal of compressing deuterium-tritium fuel to a sufficiently high areal density (ρR) to sustain a self-propagating burn wave required for fusion power gain greater than unity. These implosions are driven with a very carefully tailored sequence of four shock waves that must be timed to very high precision to keep the fuel entropy and adiabat low and ρR high. The first series of precision tuning experiments on the National Ignition Facility, which use optical diagnostics to directly measure the strength and timing of all four shocks inside a hohlraum-driven, cryogenic liquid-deuterium-filled capsule interior have now been performed. The results of these experiments are presented demonstrating a significant decrease in adiabat over previously untuned implosions. The impact of the improved shock timing is confirmed in related deuterium-tritium layered capsule implosions, which show the highest fuel compression (ρR∼1.0  g/cm2) measured to date, exceeding the previous record [V. Goncharov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 165001 (2010)] by more than a factor of 3. The experiments also clearly reveal an issue with the 4th shock velocity, which is observed to be 20% slower than predictions from numerical simulation.