Scheduled: 5th February 2019

NIF SPHERICAL STRONG SHOCK
SI EXPERIMENT

This work builds on previous campaigns on Omega 60 as detailed in 2 papers by Theobald and Nora. 

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The principle is to drive a strong spherical shock into a spherical target which has high areal density in comparison to standard Omega implosions. The areal density is necessary to stop the hot electrons generated by SI-relevant intensities. In these experiments the targets were solid, consequently the shock propagates to the centre and a bright shock flash is observed at the point of shock convergence at the centre.

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The combination of the laser-pulse shape and the shock flash time should enable the shock velocity, and hence strength to be inferred. Factors such as electron pre-heat complicate the interpretation of such experiments. This was investigated in detail by CELIA with the CHIC code including self-consistent electron transport models. They inferred that the shock strength was less than that originally inferred.

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