Wobblers and Rayleigh–Taylor instability mitigation in HIF target implosion

Abstract

A few percent wobbling-beam illumination nonuniformity is realized in heavy ion inertial confinement fusion (HIF) by a spiraling beam axis motion in the paper. The wobbling heavy ion beam (HIB) illumination was proposed to realize a uniform implosion in HIF. However, the initial imprint of the wobbling HIBs was a serious problem and introduces a large unacceptable energy deposition nonuniformity. In wobbling the HIBs illumination, the illumination nonuniformity oscillates in time and space. The oscillating-HIB energy deposition may contribute to the reduction of the HIBs' illumination nonuniformity and also the mitigation of the Rayleigh–Taylor instability. The wobbling HIBs can be generated in HIB accelerators and the oscillating frequency may be from several 100MHz to 1GHz. Three-dimensional HIBs illumination computations presented here show that the few percent wobbling HIBs illumination nonuniformity oscillates successfully with the same wobbling HIBs frequency.