Progress in octahedral spherical hohlraum study Lan, Ke; Liu, Jie; Li, Zhichao ...
Matter and Radiation at Extremes,
January 2016, 20160100, 2016-01-01, Volume:
1, Issue:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, we give a review of our theoretical and experimental progress in octahedral spherical hohlraum study. From our theoretical study, the octahedral spherical hohlraums with 6 Laser ...Entrance Holes (LEHs) of octahedral symmetry have robust high symmetry during the capsule implosion at hohlraum-to-capsule radius ratio larger than 3.7. In addition, the octahedral spherical hohlraums also have potential superiority on low backscattering without supplementary technology. We studied the laser arrangement and constraints of the octahedral spherical hohlraums, and gave a design on the laser arrangement for ignition octahedral hohlraums. As a result, the injection angle of laser beams of 50°–60° was proposed as the optimum candidate range for the octahedral spherical hohlraums. We proposed a novel octahedral spherical hohlraum with cylindrical LEHs and LEH shields, in order to increase the laser coupling efficiency and improve the capsule symmetry and to mitigate the influence of the wall blowoff on laser transport. We studied on the sensitivity of the octahedral spherical hohlraums to random errors and compared the sensitivity among the octahedral spherical hohlraums, the rugby hohlraums and the cylindrical hohlraums, and the results show that the octahedral spherical hohlraums are robust to these random errors while the cylindrical hohlraums are the most sensitive. Up till to now, we have carried out three experiments on the spherical hohlraum with 2 LEHs on Shenguang(SG) laser facilities, including demonstration of improving laser transport by using the cylindrical LEHs in the spherical hohlraums, spherical hohlraum energetics on the SGIII prototype laser facility, and comparisons of laser plasma instabilities between the spherical hohlraums and the cylindrical hohlraums on the SGIII laser facility.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
In an experiment performed on the Shenguang-III prototype laser facility, collective Thomson scattering (TS) is used to study the spatial growth of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a ...gas-filled hohlraum by detecting the SBS-driven ion acoustic wave. High-quality time-resolved SBS and TS spectra are obtained simultaneously in the experiment, and these are analyzed by a steady-state code based on the ray-tracing model. The analysis indicates that ion–ion collisions may play an important role in suppressing SBS growth in the Au plasma; as a result, the SBS excited in the filled gas region is dominant. In the early phase of the laser pulse, SBS originates primarily from the high-density plasma at the edges of the interaction beam channel, which is piled up by the heating of the interaction beam. Throughout the duration of the laser pulse, the presence of the TS probe beam might mitigate SBS by perturbing the density distribution around the region overlapping with the interaction beam.
A recently proposed octahedral spherical hohlraum with six laser entrance holes (LEHs) is an attractive concept for an upgraded laser facility aiming at a predictable and reproducible fusion gain ...with a simple target design. However, with the laser energies available at present, LEH size can be a critical issue. Owing to the uncertainties in simulation results, the LEH size should be determined on the basis of experimental evidence. However, determination of LEH size of an ignition target at a small-scale laser facility poses difficulties. In this paper, we propose to use the prepulse of an ignition pulse to determine the LEH size for ignition-scale hohlraums via LEH closure behavior, and we present convincing evidence from multiple diagnostics at the SGIII facility with ignition-scale hohlraum, laser prepulse, and laser beam size. The LEH closure observed in our experiment is in agreement with data from the National Ignition Facility. The total LEH area of the octahedral hohlraum is found to be very close to that of a cylindrical hohlraum, thus successfully demonstrating the feasibility of the octahedral hohlraum in terms of laser energy, which is crucially important for sizing an ignition-scale octahedrally configured laser system. This work provides a novel way to determine the LEH size of an ignition target at a small-scale laser facility, and it can be applied to other hohlraum configurations for the indirect drive approach.
This study explores the radiation field temperatures introduced by the laser spot, the re-emitting wall in a hohlraum and the entire hohlraum drive source. This investigation, which is the first of ...its kind, is based on the radiation fluxes from the laser spot and the re-emitting wall, which have been accurately measured using time- and space-resolving flux detectors in a recent work, and additional flux data. The temperature difference between the laser spot and the entire hohlraum drive source was 6.08-35.35% of the temperature of the latter throughout the entire laser pulse, whilst that for the re-emitting wall was 3.90-12.81%. The radiation temperature of the cooler re-emitting wall had more influence on the temperature increase of the entire hohlraum drive source than the hot laser-spot temperature, which has been quantitatively discussed. Experimentally, we established the average distributions of the temperature fields of all the emitting sources, namely laser spot and re-emitting wall, of the irradiating fluxes on the capsule region in the hohlraum radiation field. This important progress in the exploration of radiation temperature distributions within a hohlraum will provide a foundation for determination of the irradiating radiation on the capsule and evaluation of capsule symmetry.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
In order to study the laser plasma instabilities (LPIs) in the context of some novel six-side laser-driven indirect designs like the six-cylinder-port hohlraum and the three-axis cylindrical ...hohlraum, where the laser beams inject in hohlraum with a large angle. LPI experiments in cylindrical hohlraum with only outer beams were designed and performed based on the current laser arrangement condition of SGIII laser facility for the first time. Stimulated Brillouin backscatter (SBS) was found to be the dominant instability with high instantaneous reflectivity in experiments. A typical feature was obtained in the time-resolved spectra of SBS, which maintained similar for different laser intensities of the interaction beam. The experimental data are analyzed by the hydrodynamic simulations combined with HLIP code, which is based on the ray-tracing model. By analysis of experimental data, it is argued that the mixture of gas and Au in the region of their interface is important to SBS, which indicates the need for the mixture model between the filled gas and the high Z plasma from hohlraum wall in the hydrodynamic simulations. Nonlinear saturation of SBS as well as the smoothed beam are also discussed here. Our effective considerations of the ions pervasion effect and the smoothed beam provide utilitarian ways for improvement of the current ray-tracing method.
We report experimental research on laser plasma interaction (LPI) conducted in Shenguang laser facilities during the past ten years. The research generally consists of three phases: (1) developing ...platforms for LPI research in mm-scale plasma with limited drive energy, where both gasbag and gas-filled hohlraum targets are tested; (2) studying the effects of beam-smoothing techniques, such as continuous phase plate and polarization smoothing, on the suppression of LPI; and (3) exploring the factors affecting LPI in integrated implosion experiments, which include the laser intensity, gas-fill pressure, size of the laser-entrance hole, and interplay between different beam cones. Results obtained in each phase will be presented and discussed in detail.
A 100 kJ-level laser facility has been designed to study inertial confinement fusion physics in China. This facility incorporates various diagnostic techniques, including optical, x-ray imaging, ...x-ray spectrum, and fusion product diagnostics, as well as general diagnostics assistance systems and central control and data acquisition systems. This paper describes recent developments in diagnostics at the facility.
The first laser–plasma interaction experiment using lasers of eight beams grouped into one octad has been conducted on the Shenguang Octopus facility. Although each beam intensity is below its ...individual threshold for stimulated Brillouin backscattering (SBS), collective behaviors are excited to enhance the octad SBS. In particular, when two-color/cone lasers with wavelength separation 0.3 nm are used, the backward SBS reflectivities show novel behavior in which beams of longer wavelength achieve higher SBS gain. This property of SBS can be attributed to the rotation of the wave vectors of common ion acoustic waves due to the competition of detunings between geometrical angle and wavelength separation. This mechanism is confirmed using massively parallel supercomputer simulations with the three-dimensional laser–plasma interaction code LAP3D.
An ultrathin layer of uranium nitrides (UN) has been coated on the inner surface of depleted uranium hohlraum (DUH), which has been proven by our experiment to prevent the oxidization of uranium (U) ...effectively. Comparative experiments between the novel depleted uranium hohlraum and pure golden (Au) hohlraum are implemented on an SGIII-prototype laser facility. Under a laser intensity of 6 × 1014 W cm−2, we observe that the hard x-ray (h keV) fraction of the uranium hohlraum decreases by 61% and the peak intensity of the total x-ray flux (0.1 keV∼5.0 keV) increases by 5%. Radiation hydrodynamic code LARED is used to interpret the above observations. Our result for the first time indicates the advantages of the UN-coated DUH in generating a uniform x-ray source with a quasi-Planckian spectrum, which should have important applications in high energy density physics.
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