Recent experiments on the National Ignition Facility [M. J. Edwards et al., Phys. Plasmas 20, 070501 (2013)] demonstrate that utilizing a near-vacuum hohlraum (low pressure gas-filled) is a viable option for high convergence cryogenic deuterium-tritium (DT) layered capsule implosions. This is made possible by using a dense ablator (high-density carbon), which shortens the drive duration needed to achieve high convergence: a measured 40% higher hohlraum efficiency than typical gas-filled hohlraums, which requires less laser energy going into the hohlraum, and an observed better symmetry control than anticipated by standard hydrodynamics simulations. The first series of near-vacuum hohlraum experiments culminated in a 6.8 ns, 1.2 MJ laser pulse driving a 2-shock, high adiabat (α ∼ 3.5) cryogenic DT layered high density carbon capsule. This resulted in one of the best performances so far on the NIF relative to laser energy, with a measured primary neutron yield of 1.8 × 10 15 neutrons, with 20% calculated alpha heating at convergence ∼27×. Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments implode millimeter-scale deuterium-tritium (DT) filled spherical capsules, compressing and heating the DT fuel to fusion conditions and releasing energy [1]. Indirect-drive ICF places the fuel-filled capsule at the center of a high-Z radiation enclosure (hohlraum) and strikes the inside walls of the hohlraum with laser power. This produces an internal bath of x rays-a radiation drive which ablates and implodes the fuel-filled capsule. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) [2,3] drives this process using 192 frequency-tripled laser beams (351 nm at 3ω), which enter a cylindrical hohlraum through laser entrance holes (LEHs) at each end. The laser beams are pointed through the LEHs to provide various angles of drive to the capsule such that the superposition of drives can be spherically symmetric throughout the implosion time.Typically, ICF experiments on the NIF have utilized plastic (CH) capsules inside gold hohlraums filled with helium at densities ranging from 0.96 [4] to 1.6 mg=cm Although vacuum hohlraums were initially considered, the long pulse duration for CH capsules led to choosing higher densities of hohlraum fill [7,8] to minimize expansion of the interior gold wall [ Fig. 1(a)] [9]. The intended effect is to maintain an open path for laser propagation to the wall for the full pulse duration.In this Letter, we report on the first experimental campaign on the NIF using near-vacuum hohlraums (NVH) to drive a high convergence cryogenic DT layered capsule implosion. A NVH has a hohlraum fill density of 0.03 mg=cm 3 helium, more than an order of magnitude lower density than conventional gas-filled hohlraums (0.96-1.6 mg=cm 3 ). Symmetry of implosions driven with the NVH is controlled through direct adjustments to the inner and outer beam power balance rather than relying on beam wavelength separations [10] and the resultant crossbeam energy transfer [11,12]. Unlike earlier research on true "vacuum" hohlraums [13][14][15], the NVH...