The influence of laser clipped by the laser entrance hole on hohlraum radiation measurement on Shenguang-III prototype

Abstract

Measuring the x-ray flux exiting the target's laser entrance hole (LEH) is the most common diagnostic that quantifies the x-ray intensity inside the laser-driven hohlraum. However, this signal accounts for only a small portion of the incident laser power and thus is likely to be affected by unwanted x-ray background from non-target area, leading to an overestimation of the hohlraum drive. Unwanted emission might be produced when the laser light is clipped by the LEH (LEH clipping) because of a lack of clearance for laser spot, or with a laser spot comprising of discrete structure, or even with a poor pointing accuracy. Its influence on the hohlraum radiation diagnostic is investigated on Shenguang-III prototype laser facility with the typical 1 ns square pulse. The experiment employed three types of targets to excite the unwanted x-ray background from LEH clipping, unconverted light, and both effects, respectively. This work gives an absolute evaluation of x-ray produced by the LEH clipping, which is measured by flat-response x-ray detectors (FXRD) at multiple view angles. The result indicates that there is little variation in measured emission to various view angles, because the unwanted x-rays are mainly generated at the side face of the LEH lip when laser is obliquely incident. Therefore, the LEH clipping brings more overestimation in hohlraum radiation measurement at larger view angle since the hohlraum LEH as an emitting source viewed by FXRD is decreased as the view angle increases. In our condition, the LEH clipping contributes 2%-3.5% overestimation to the hohlraum flux measurement.