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Title: Beyond alpha-heating: driving inertially confined fusion implosions toward a burning-plasma state on the National Ignition Facility

Journal Article · · Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

Recent progress on indirectly-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF) work at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is briefly reviewed. An analytic criteria for an ICF burning plasma is given and compared to recent ICF implosion data from the NIF. Scaling of key hot-spot performance metrics is derived from simple physics considerations, including some speculative impacts of asymmetry on the assembly and disassembly of an ICF implosion. A steepest descent solution for the nonlinear equation for hot-spot pressure at peak compression, with the full effects of alpha-heating, is also given. To test if the scalings derived in this paper have some merit, they are compared to data from a variety of recent implosion campaigns on NIF and good agreement is observed. Given the implications of the scalings and existing data, a strategy for injecting more energy into the hot-spot of NIF indirectly driven ICF implosions is defined and the principles of the strategy is discussed. The importance of implosion velocity, late-time ablation pressure, and implosion scale with good symmetry in obtaining the goal of ~50% more hot-spot energy are highlighted along with the limitations of trying to leverage low fuel-adiabat.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344
OSTI ID:
1524748
Report Number(s):
LLNL-JRNL-756923; 944627
Journal Information:
Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Vol. 61, Issue 1; ISSN 0741-3335
Publisher:
IOP ScienceCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 50 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (4)

Approaching a burning plasma on the NIF journal May 2019
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Implosion performance of subscale beryllium capsules on the NIF journal May 2019
On alpha-particle transport in inertial fusion journal June 2019