HTPD 2018

Inertial confinement fusion self-emission imaging provides a challenging environment for two-dimensional time resolved x-ray imaging. The short lived (~200 ps) spherical implosion dynamically evolves throughout the deuterium-tritium (DT) compression. Current microscopes with ~10 µm spatial resolution and 20-100 ps time resolution provide sufficient information to infer hot spot volume and emissivity under certain physical constraints. The introduction of high-atomic number materials as shell dopants, in conjunction with the susceptibility of the implosion to seeded hydrodynamic growth, has led to continued observations of high-spatial-frequency x-ray bright spots that evolve internally to the hot DT core. We wish to determine the origin and nature of these features through the application of higher resolution x-ray microscopes. This goal requires addressing both the image forming system and the detector resolution and statistics, in addition to the physics we hope to infer. With new reflective x-ray optics and coded aperture imaging being considered alongside the next generation of fast x-ray detectors, this paper addresses the instrument design requirement to measure ‘bright spot’ features at the NIF. Prepared by LLNL under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-744014.