Gated x-ray detector for the National Ignition Facility

Advanced Gated X-Ray Imagers for Experiments at the National Ignition Facility

X-ray imaging is integral to the measurement of the properties of hot plasmas. To this end, a suite of gated x-ray imagers have been developed for use in a wide range of experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). These instruments are sensitive to x-rays over the range of 0.7-90keV and can acquire images at 20ps intervals for source intensities ranging over several orders of magnitude...

Polar-Driven X-ray Backlighter Targets for the National Ignition Facility

Observation of high soft x-ray drive in large-scale hohlraums at the National Ignition Facility.

The first soft x-ray radiation flux measurements from hohlraums using both a 96 and a 192 beam configuration at the National Ignition Facility have shown high x-ray conversion efficiencies of ∼85%-90%. These experiments employed gold vacuum hohlraums, 6.4 mm long and 3.55 mm in diameter, heated with laser energies between 150-635 kJ. The hohlraums reached radiation temperatures of up to 340 eV....

Diagnosing Implosions at the National Ignition Facility with X-ray Spectroscopy

X-ray spectroscopy is used on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to diagnose the plasma conditions in the hot spot and the compressed shell of ignition-scale inertial confinement fusion (ICF) implosions. Ignition of an ICF target depends on the formation of a central hot spot with sufficient temperature and areal density. The concentric spherical layers of current NIF ignition targets consist...

X-ray imaging in an environment with high-neutron background on National Ignition Facility

X-ray imaging instruments will operate in a harsh ionizing radiation background environment on implosion experiments at the National Ignition Facility. These backgrounds consist of mostly neutrons and gamma rays produced by inelastic scattering of neutrons. Imaging systems based on x-ray framing cameras with film and CCD’s have been designed to operate in such harsh neutron-induced background e...