A taxonomy for the hundreds of diagnostics on the US Inertial Confinement Fusion facilities*

The three large US ICF facilities, NIF, Z and OMEGA have a large number, 200 to 300, of operating diagnostics. These diagnostics have been built up over scores of years and it can therefore be difficult to quickly understand their function and their mode of operation. This paper will show that nearly all the ICF diagnostic instruments can be categorized in a two dimensional array, one axis representing the front end which is  either an imager or a spectrometer, and an orthogonal axis representing the detector of the emitted “particles” ( light, x-ray, neutrons etc.) after they have been through the front end. The diagnostic instruments can be used in emission, absorption or scattering experimental platforms making a simple third axis of this way of looking at the ICF diagnostics. Many examples of this taxonomy will be shown for  the diagnostics and platforms for NIF, the National Ignition Facility.