Indirect-drive hohlraum experiments at the National Ignition Facility have demonstrated symmetric capsule implosions at unprecedented laser drive energies of 0.7 megajoule. One hundred and ninety-two simultaneously fired laser beams heat ignition-emulate hohlraums to radiation temperatures of 3.3 million kelvin, compressing 1.8-millimeter-diameter capsules by the soft x-rays produced by the hoh...

Neutron-imaging systems are being considered as an ignition diagnostic for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) [Hogan et al., Nucl. Fusion 41, 567 (2001)]. Given the importance of these systems, a neutron-imaging design tool is being used to quantify the effects of aperture fabrication and alignment tolerances on reconstructed neutron images for inertial confinement fusion. The simulations ind...

Advanced concepts for direct drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF) have emerged that may lead to sufficient gain for the energy application (g>140) at laser driver energies as low as 1 megajoule. For example, recent “shock ignition” designs compress low aspect ratio pellets then apply a final high intensity spike pulse (10 16 W/cm 2 ) to ignite the fuel via a converging shock wave. These anal...