Experimental testing of thin-shell stable acceleration for ICF schemes with direct and indirect drive

Abstract

The present review is of the experimental investigations on laser-plasma interaction being carried out in past years at IAE. Experiments were conducted on the “Mishen” facility. The laser system of Mishen consists of two channels with output beam parameters as follows: the main beam—output energy 100–200 J (λ = 1.054 μm) in 3-ns pulse, divergence ∼2 × 10-4 rad, contrast ratio ∼106, power density at the target surface ∼1013–1014 W/cm2; the diagnostic beam–output energy 10–20 J (λ = 1.054 μm) and 5–10 J (λ = 0.53 μm) in 0.3-ns pulse, divergence ∼10-4 rad, power density 1013 - 1014 W/cm2. Our aim in this experiment is to study the different aspects of the ICF processes in flat geometry. The main issues of our studies are hydrodynamic aspects, including acceleration efficiency, high-velocity impact in cascade targets, hydrostability, and X-ray physicsconversion efficiency, heat transfer, and X-ray-driven targets.

High speed plasma diagnostics for laser plasma interaction and fusion studies

“…Figures 16 and 17 show the intensity profiles of X-ray spectra obtained from copper and gold plasma respectively. The X-ray spectra of copper and gold plasmas were found to be in good agreement with other reported results (Schwanda & Eidmann 1992;Bolotin et al 1993). In the case of copper, the dominant line spectra from L shell at nearly 10 ,~ provides clear single peaks of both first and second order, whereas in the case of gold plasma, which Intensity profile of X-ray spectrum from copper plasma.…”

“…However, they suffer from a complicated alignment and astigmatism problem. However transmission gratings (Alexandrov et al 1988(Alexandrov et al , 1989Pina et al 1991;Bolotin et al 1993) are of interest as X-ray optics elements. Spectrometersobased on such gratings provide a wide working range from a few angstroms to a few 100A and good spectrum visibility at a resolution of A/AA ~ 10 2.…”

“…In this case alignment is very easy and it can provide spatial resolution throughout the spectral range if a slit or a pin-hole is mounted in front of it. X-ray transmission grating spectrograph (Alexandrov et al 1988(Alexandrov et al , 1989Pina et al 1991;Schwanda & Eidmann 1992;Bolotin et al 1993) has proved to be a good tool for determining the radiation temperature of laser irradiated gold cavities along with the spatial and absolute spectral information. A transmission grating spectrometer has been developed to study the spectral property of X-rays being emitted from the plasma as well as to measure the black body radiation temperature from the gold cavity or hohlraum target.…”