Scattering of laser light by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) is a concern for indirect drive inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The hohlraum designs for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) raise particular concerns due to the large scale and homogeneity of the plasmas within them. Experiments at Nova have studied laser–plasma interactions within large scale length plasmas that mimic many of the characteristics of the NIF hohlraum plasmas. Filamentation and scattering of laser light by SBS and SRS have been investigated as a function of beam smoothing and plasma conditions. Narrowly collimated SRS backscatter has been observed from low density, low-Z, plasmas, which are representative of the plasma filling most of the NIF hohlraum. SBS backscatter is found to occur in the high-Z plasma of gold ablated from the wall. Both SBS and SRS are observed to be at acceptable levels in experiments using smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD).

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The fine metal wire x-pinch is a compact source of soft-x-ray emission. Under certain conditions, x rays in the 3–7 keV range are emitted in <1 ns bursts from source regions that are <10 μm in size. The small size and high intensity of these 3–7 keV sources makes the x-pinch useful as a point source for x-ray backlighting. This capability has been demonstrated by using an x-pinch to produce radiographic images of separate x-pinches and z-pinches.