Progress on Achieving the ICF Conditions Needed for High Gain

Abstract

Progress during the past two years has moved us much closer to demonstrating the scientific and technological requirements for high gain ICF in the laboratory. This progress has been made possible by operating at the third harmonic of lym light which dramatically reduces concern about hot electrons and by advances in diagnostics such as 100 ps x-ray framing cameras which greatly increase the data available from each experiment. Making use of many of these new capabilities, major improvements in confinement conditions have been achieved for ICF implosions. In particular, in an optimized hohlraum on Nova, radiation driven implosions with convergence ratio in excess of 30 (volume compression ∼3 × 104) have performed essentially as predicted by spherical implosion calculations. This paper presents these results as well as examples of advances in several other areas and discusses the implications for the future of ICF with lasers and heavy ion beam drivers.