Simulations of high-gain shock-ignited inertial-confinement-fusion implosions using less than 1 MJ of direct KrF-laser energy

In this paper, we report on recent numerical simulations of inertial-confinement-fusion (ICF) implosions using the FAST radiation hydrocode at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Our study focuses on three classes of shock-ignited target designs utilizing less than 1 MJ of direct, krypton-fluoride (KrF) laser energy, which was zoomed to maximize the coupling efficiency. In the shock-ignition approach [R. Betti, C.D. Zhou, K.S. Anderson, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 155001], a moderate-intensity, compressive laser pulse is followed by a short-duration high-intensity spike that launches a spherically-convergent shock wave to ignite a thick shell of compressed fuel. Such an arrangement appears to offer several significant advantages, including a low ignition threshold, high gain, and less susceptibility to the deleterious effects of hydrodynamic and laser-plasma instabilities. According to one-dimensional simulations, fusion gains over 200 can be achieved with shock-ignited targets using less than 750 kJ of laser energy. This represents a significant improvement in performance over conventional centrally-ignited designs. To examine the stability of these targets, several two-dimensional simulations were also performed that incorporated realistic perturbation sources such as laser imprinting and roughness spectra for inner/outer pellet surfaces. Although the simulations indicate that appreciable low-mode distortion of the fuel shell can occur at late time as a result of these perturbations, high gains are still achieved in many cases owing to the low in-flight aspect ratios of shock-ignited targets. We should remark, though, that the high convergence ratios of these same designs suggest that other sources of low-mode asymmetries, which were not considered in this study (e.g., beam misalignment and energy-balance errors), may be important in determining overall pellet stability and performance. We discuss these issues, as well as other salient design considerations for shock-ignited ICF targets. Published by Elsevier B.V.