M.B. Schneider,
D.E. Hinkel,
S.J. Moon,
S.B. Hansen,
H.A. Baldis, C. Austrheim-Smith,
G.V. Brown,
K.M. Campbell,
H.-K. Chung,
K. Cone, [......],
J. Schein,
J. Seely,
W. Seka,
R. Shepherd,
M.S. Singh,
C. Sorce,
R.E. Turner,
F. Weber,
K. Widmann,
B.K. Young
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ABSTRACT: High temperature (“hot”) hohlraums are being developed to heat samples to high temperatures for opacity or other atomic physics studies. Hot hohlraums have been fielded at the National Ignition Facility [D.E. Hinkel, et al., Phys. Plasmas 12 (2005) 056305] and the OMEGA [M.B. Schneider, et al., Phys. Plasmas 13 (2006) 112701] lasers. They reach high radiation temperatures by coupling a maximum amount of laser energy (10 kJ) into small, i.e., 400–800 μm diameter, gold hohlraums in a 1 ns pulse causing the hohlraums to fill with gold plasma. Radiation temperatures of 370 eV have been measured in the laser entrance hole (LEH) region of these targets [D.E. Hinkel, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 (2006) 195001]. However, the LEH radiation is not the radiation drive of interest as the sample can neither be shielded from the non-thermal components of this radiation nor protected from the gold plasma. To mitigate these problems the source we are developing uses the radiation from the X-ray burnthrough of thin walls of a pair of hot hohlraums to heat a sample. We report on the measured radiation drive of this source and its use to heat a surrogate sample. We characterize the radiative heating of the sample by measuring its thermal expansion.
High Energy Density Physics.
