Reaching ignition in direct-drive (DD) inertial confinement fusion implosions requires achieving central pressures in excess of 100 Gbar. The OMEGA laser system [T. R. Boehly et al., Opt. Commun. 133, 495 (1997)] is used to study the physics of implosions that are hydrodynamically equivalent to the ignition designs on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) [J. A. Paisner et al., Laser Focus World 30, 75 (1994)]. It is shown that the highest hot-spot pressures (up to 40 Gbar) are achieved in target designs with a fuel adiabat of a ' 4, an implosion velocity of 3.8 Â 10 7 cm/s, and a laser intensity of $10 15 W/cm 2. These moderate-adiabat implosions are well understood using two-dimensional hydrocode simulations. The performance of lower-adiabat implosions is significantly degraded relative to code predictions, a common feature between DD implosions on OMEGA and indirect-drive cryogenic implosions on the NIF. Simplified theoretical models are developed to gain physical understanding of the implosion dynamics that dictate the target performance. These models indicate that degradations in the shell density and integrity (caused by hydrodynamic instabilities during the target acceleration) coupled with hydrodynamics at stagnation are the main failure mechanisms in low-adiabat designs. To demonstrate ignition hydrodynamic equivalence in cryogenic implosions on OMEGA, the target-design robustness to hydrodynamic instability growth must be improved by reducing laser-coupling losses caused by cross beam energy transfer. V

Collective Thomson scattering is a technique for measuring the plasma conditions in laser-plasma experiments. Simultaneous measurements of ion-acoustic and electron plasma-wave spectra were obtained using a 263.25-nm Thomson-scattering probe beam. A fully reflective collection system was used to record light scattered from electron plasma waves at electron densities greater than 10 cm, which produced scattering peaks near 200 nm. An accurate analysis of the experimental Thomson-scattering spectra required accounting for plasma gradients, instrument sensitivity, optical effects, and background radiation. Practical techniques for including these effects when fitting Thomson-scattering spectra are presented and applied to the measured spectra to show the improvements in plasma characterization.

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