Investigating the hohlraum radiation properties through the angular distribution of the radiation temperature

Abstract

The symmetric radiation drive is essential to the capsule implosion in the indirect drive fusion but is hard to achieve due to the non-uniform radiation distribution inside the hohlraum. In this work, the non-uniform radiation properties of both vacuum and gas-filled hohlraums are studied by investigating the angular distribution of the radiation temperature experimentally and numerically. It is found that the non-uniform radiation distribution inside the hohlraum induces the variation of the radiation temperature between different view angles. The simulations show that both the angular distribution of the radiation temperature and the hohlraum radiation distribution can be affected by the electron heat flux. The measured angular distribution of the radiation temperature is more consistent with the simulations when the electron heat flux limiter fe=0.1. Comparisons between the experiments and simulations further indicate that the x-ray emission of the blow-off plasma is overestimated in the simulations when it stagnates around the hohlraum axis. The axial position of the laser spot can also be estimated by the angular distribution of the radiation temperature due to their sensitive dependence. The inferred laser spot moves closer to the laser entrance hole in the gas-filled hohlraum than that in the vacuum hohlraum, consisting with the x-ray images taken from the framing camera. The angular distribution of the radiation temperature provides an effective way to investigate the hohlraum radiation properties and introduces more constraint to the numerical modeling of the hohlraum experiments.