Neutron generation from impact fast ignition

Abstract

We have proposed a new ignition scheme of Fast Ignition, called ‘Impact Fast Ignition [1] (IFI)’, in which a compressed fuel is ignited by impact collision of a fragment of separately imploded fuel. We have started experiments that used CD colliding foils as the fundamental experiment and integrated experiment of the IFI. In the fundamental experiment, we used targets which are consists of two CD foils (thickness of 20 μm) with a 600 μm separation. We have irradiated one of the CD foils by laser beams of the energy of 2 kJ in total and accelerated. The accelerated CD foil collides with another foil, and neutrons were generated by the nuclear fusion reaction on the heated foil. In this experiment, we measured the neutron yield of 106. In the integrated experiment, we used CD shell targets with a gold cone which had a hemispherical impactor (Fig. 1). The shell was imploded using 9 beams and the impactor was accelerated using 3 beams of the GEKKO XII laser system. The laser energy was 350 J per beam. Observed maximum neutron yield was 2 × 106. This yield was 80 times as large as that without impactor. We will present the experimental details and results.