Numerical simulations of the HiPER baseline target

Abstract

The European High Power laser Energy Research (HiPER) project aims at demonstrating the feasibility of high gain inertial confinement fusion (ICF) using the fast ignitor approach. A baseline target has been recently developed by Atzeni et al. [Phys. Plasmas 14, 052702 (2007)]. The comparison between a standard and a relaxation pulse shows that the latter one allows to reduce both the laser power contrast and the growth of perturbation under Rayleigh-Taylor instability. We have found that with 95 kJ of absorbed laser energy one can assemble the fuel with to a peak density around 500 g/cm3 and to a peak areal density of 1.2 g/cm2. This implies a total target gain of about 55.