The high-foot implosion campaign on the National Ignition Facility

The High-Foot platform manipulates the laser pulse-shape coming from the National Ignition Facility laser to create an indirect drive 3-shock implosion that is significantly more robust against instability growth involving the ablator and also modestly reduces implosion convergence ratio. This strategy gives up on theoretical high-gain in an inertial confinement fusion implosion in order to obtain better control of the implosion and bring experimental performance in-line with calculated performance, yet keeps the absolute capsule performance relatively high. In this paper, we will cover the various experimental and theoretical motivations for the high-foot drive as well as cover the experimental results that have come out of the high-foot experimental campaign. At the time of this writing, the high-foot implosion has demonstrated record total deuterium-tritium yields (9.3 x 10(15)) with low levels of inferred mix, excellent agreement with implosion simulations, fuel energy gains exceeding unity, and evidence for the bootstrapping associated with alpha-particle self-heating. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.