54th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics
Volume 57, Number 12
Monday–Friday, October 29–November 2 2012;
Providence, Rhode Island
Session MR1: Review: Progress Towards Ignition on the National Ignition Facility
8:00 AM–9:00 AM,
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Room: Ballroom ADE
Chair: David Meyerhofer, University of Rochester
Abstract ID: BAPS.2012.DPP.MR1.1
Abstract: MR1.00001 : Progress Towards Ignition on the National Ignition Facility
8:00 AM–9:00 AM
Preview Abstract
Author:
John Edwards
(Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Since completion of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) construction
project in March 2009, a wide variety of diagnostics, facility
infrastructure, and experimental platforms have been commissioned in pursuit
of generating the conditions necessary to reach thermonuclear ignition in
the laboratory via the inertial confinement approach. NIF's capabilities and
infrastructure include over 50 X-ray, optical, and nuclear diagnostics
systems and the ability to shoot cryogenic DT layered capsules. There are
two main approaches to ICF: direct drive in which laser light impinges
directly on a capsule containing a solid layer of DT fuel, and indirect
drive in which the laser light is first converted to thermal X-rays. To date
NIF has been conducting experiments using the indirect drive approach,
injecting up to 1.8MJ of ultraviolet light (0.35 micron) into 1 cm scale
cylindrical gold or gold-coated uranium, gas-filled hohlraums, to implode
1mm radius plastic capsules containing solid DT fuel layers. In order to
achieve ignition conditions the implosion must be precisely controlled. The
National Ignition Campaign (NIC), an international effort with the goal of
demonstrating thermonuclear burn in the laboratory, is making steady
progress toward this. Utilizing precision pulse-shaping experiments in early
2012 the NIC achieve fuel rhoR of approximately 1.2 gm/cm$^2$ with densities of
around 600-800 g/cm$^3$ along with neutron yields within about a factor of 5
necessary to enter a regime in which alpha particle heating will become
important. To achieve these results, experimental platforms were developed
to carefully control key attributes of the implosion. This talk will review
NIF's capabilities and the progress toward ignition, as well as the physics
of ignition targets on NIF and on other facilities. Acknowledgement: this
work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2012.DPP.MR1.1