Observations of multimode perturbation decay at non-accelerating, soft x-ray driven ablation fronts

Minimizing the growth of hydrodynamic instabilities is a fundamental design issue facing the achievement of thermonuclear ignition and burn with Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). The thin capsules and extreme accelerations found in ICF make it an inherently unstable system primarily to Rayleigh-Taylor (RT) occurring at the ablation front. A potential mechanism by which perturbations at the outer capsule surface can be reduced lies in the already present ablative Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) effect, which operates during the first shock transit of the ablator. At present, the available Equation of State (EOS) models predict a wide range of behavior for the ablative RM oscillations of multimode isolated defects on plastic (CH) capsules. To resolve these differences, we conducted experiments at the OMEGA Laser Facility [ T. R. Boehly et al., Optics Comm. 133 (1997)] that measured the evolution of gaussian-shaped bumps driven by soft x-ray ablation from a halfraum. Shock speeds in the CH target were measured to reach 15 mu m/ns for halfraum radiation temperatures of 70 eV lasting for up to 7 ns. The evolution of gaussian-shaped bumps of different widths and heights were measured using on-axis x-ray radiography at up to 37x magnification. Bumps with initial widths of 34 and 44 mu m FWHM were found to grow by 3x their initial areal density and then saturate out to 6 ns due to lateral compression of the bump characteristic of the formation of a rippled shock front propagating into the solid target. Narrower 17 mu m FWHM bumps, on the other hand, grew by roughly 2x followed immediately by a decrease back to initial values of areal density out to 7 ns, which largely agrees with both LEOS 5310 and SESAME 7592 EOS predictions. The difference in observed behavior suggests that high spatial frequency modes found in narrower bumps are needed to significantly affect the ablation front profile on shorter time scales. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4771680]