The Nike laser group at the Naval Research Laboratory has an ongoing effort to improve and benchmark the radiation hydrodynamic simulations used to develop pellet designs for inertial confinement fusion. A new postprocessor, Virtual Spectro, has been added to the FAST code suite for detailed simulation of non-LTE spectra, including radiation transport effects and Stark line profile. This new combination enhances our ability to predict the absolute emission of soft x-rays. An absolutely calibrated transmission grating spectrometer and a high resolution grazing incidence spectrometer have been used to collect time integrated and time resolved spectra emitted by CH targets irradiated at laser intensities of ∼ 10 TW/cm 2 . Comparison between these observations and simulations using Virtual Spectro demonstrates excellent agreement (within factor of ∼ 1.5) for the absolute emission.
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