Developing depleted uranium and gold cocktail hohlraums for the National Ignition Facility

Fusion ignition experiments are planned to begin at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) [J. A. Paisner, E. M. Campbell, and W. J. Hogan, Fusion Technol. 26, 755 (1994)] using the indirect drive configuration [J. D. Lindl, P. Amendt, R. L. Berger, S. G. Glendinning, S. H. Glenzer, S. W. Haan, R. L, Kauffman, O. L. Landen, and L. J. Suter, Phys. Plasmas 11, 339 (2004)]. Although the x-ray drive in this configuration is highly symmetric, energy is lost in the conversion process due to x-ray penetration into the hohlraum wall. To mitigate this loss, depleted uranium is incorporated into the traditional gold hohlraum to increase the efficiency of the laser to x-ray energy conversion by making the wall more opaque to the x rays [H. Nishumura, T. Endo, H. Shiraga, U. Kato, and S. Nakai, Appl. Phys. Lett. 62, 1344 (1993)]. Multilayered depleted uranium (DU) and gold hohlraums are deposited by sputtering by alternately rotating a hohlraum mold in front of separate DU and Au sources to build up multilayers to the ...

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