Progress in octahedral spherical hohlraum study

Abstract

In this paper, we give a review of our theoretical and experimental progress in octahedral spherical hohlraum study. From our theoretical study, the octahedral spherical hohlraums with 6 Laser Entrance Holes (LEHs) of octahedral symmetry have robust high symmetry during the capsule implosion at hohlraum-to-capsule radius ratio larger than 3.7. In addition, the octahedral spherical hohlraums also have potential superiority on low backscattering without supplementary technology. We studied the laser arrangement and constraints of the octahedral spherical hohlraums, and gave a design on the laser arrangement for ignition octahedral hohlraums. As a result, the injection angle of laser beams of 50°–60° was proposed as the optimum candidate range for the octahedral spherical hohlraums. We proposed a novel octahedral spherical hohlraum with cylindrical LEHs and LEH shields, in order to increase the laser coupling efficiency and improve the capsule symmetry and to mitigate the influence of the wall blowoff on laser transport. We studied on the sensitivity of the octahedral spherical hohlraums to random errors and compared the sensitivity among the octahedral spherical hohlraums, the rugby hohlraums and the cylindrical hohlraums, and the results show that the octahedral spherical hohlraums are robust to these random errors while the cylindrical hohlraums are the most sensitive. Up till to now, we have carried out three experiments on the spherical hohlraum with 2 LEHs on Shenguang(SG) laser facilities, including demonstration of improving laser transport by using the cylindrical LEHs in the spherical hohlraums, spherical hohlraum energetics on the SGIII prototype laser facility, and comparisons of laser plasma instabilities between the spherical hohlraums and the cylindrical hohlraums on the SGIII laser facility.