Abstract
Fast ignition with narrow-band coherent x-ray pulses has been revisited for cryogenic deuterium-tritium (DT) plasma conditions achieved on the OMEGA Laser System. In contrast to using hard-x-rays (hv = 3–6 keV) proposed in the original x-ray fast-ignition proposal, we find that soft-x-ray sources with hv ≈ 500 eV photons can be suitable for igniting the dense DT-plasmas achieved on OMEGA. Two-dimensional radiation–hydrodynamics simulations have identified the break-even conditions for realizing such a “hybrid” ignition scheme (direct-drive compression with soft-x-ray heating) with 50-μm-offset targets: ∼10 ps soft-x-ray pulse (hv ≈ 500 eV) with a total energy of 500–1000 J to be focused into a 10 μm spot-size. A variety of x-ray pulse parameters have also been investigated for optimization. It is noted that an order of magnitude increase in neutron yield has been predicted even with x-ray energy as low as ∼50 J. Scaling this idea to a 1 MJ large-scale target, a gain above ∼30 can be reached with the same soft-x-ray pulse at 1.65 kJ energy. Even though such energetic x-ray sources do not currently exist, we hope that the proposed ignition scheme may stimulate efforts on generating powerful soft-x-ray sources in the near future.
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