The Effect of Increased Irradiation Uniformity on Imprinting by 351-nm Laser Light

LLE Review, Volume 71 101 The experimental program1 at LLE supports the national inertial confinement fusion (ICF) effort by performing experiments on OMEGA2 to investigate the requirements for attaining ignition using direct-drive targets on the National Ignition Facility. One of the primary challenges in direct-drive ICF is to minimize perturbations in the target that are created by nonuniformities in the drive laser. These imprinted perturbations can seed the Richtmeyer–Meshkov (RM) and Rayleigh–Taylor (RT) instabilities that can amplify target nonuniformities sufficiently large enough to destroy an implosion. Typical high-gain implosions are expected to experience unstable growth factors in excess of 500.