Polychromatic drivers for inertial fusion energy

Abstract

Although tremendous achievements have been made toward inertial confinement fusion, laser plasma instabilities (LPIs) remain to be the inevitable problem for current drive schemes. To mitigate these instabilities, here we propose the design of polychromatic drivers for the generation of multicolor beams based upon optical parametric amplification and frequency conversion technologies. Each polychromatic light has four colors of monochromatic beamlets with a full spectrum width of 3%, and the beamlet colors of any two adjacent flanges are different. The suppression effects of such polychromatic lights have been investigated via particle-incell simulations, which indicate that more than 35% of the incident energies can be saved from the LPIs compared with monochromatic lasers for the direct drive scheme, or high-density filled target for the indirect drive scheme. The proposed polychromatic drivers are based on the matured technologies, and thus may pave the way towards realization of stable and high-efficiency fusion ignition.