The Nike krypton fluoride laser ͓S. P. Obenschain, S. E. Bodner, D. Colombant, et al., Phys. Plasmas 3, 2098 ͑1996͔͒ is used to accelerate planar plastic foils to velocities that for the first time reach 1000 km/s. Collision of the highly accelerated deuterated polystyrene foil with a stationary target produces ϳGbar shock pressures and results in heating of the foil to thermonuclear temperatures. The impact conditions are diagnosed using DD fusion neutron yield, with ϳ10 6 neutrons produced during the collision. Time-of-flight neutron detectors are used to measure the ion temperature upon impact, which reaches 2-3 keV.
We performed integrated experiments on impact ignition, in which a portion of a deuterated polystyrene (CD) shell was accelerated to about 600 km/s and was collided with precompressed CD fuel. The kinetic energy of the impactor was efficiently converted into thermal energy generating a temperature of about 1.6 keV. We achieved a two-order-of-magnitude increase in the neutron yield by optimizing the timing of the impact collision, demonstrating the high potential of impact ignition for fusion energy production.
A new ignition scheme, impact fast ignition (IFI), is studied, in which the compressed DT main fuel is to be ignited by impact with another fraction of separately imploded DT fuel, which is accelerated in the hollow conical target. The first and distinct milestone in the IFI scenario is the demonstration of such a hyper-velocity, of the order of 10 8 cm s −1 . Two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation results obtained in full geometry using plastic instead of DT fuel are presented, in which some key physical parameters for the impact shell dynamics, such as an implosion velocity of 10 8 cm s −1 , a compressed density of 300-400 g cm −3 and a converted temperature greater than 5 keV, are demonstrated. A preliminary experimental result with a planar target is presented to show the highest velocity, 6 × 10 7 cm s −1 , ever achieved.
We present experiments performed with the LULI2000 nanosecond laser facility. We generated plasma jets by using specific designed target. The main measured quantities related to the jet such as its propagation velocity, temperature and emissive radius evolution are presented. We also performed analytical work, which explains the jet evolution in some cases.
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