This document summarizes the Indirect Drive Warm-Loaded Ignition Target design. These targets either use a fill tube or the capsule is strong enough to withstand the room temperature pressure of the DT fuel. Only features that affect the design of the NIF Cryogenic Target System (NCTS) are presented. The design presented is the current thinking and may evolve further. The NCTS should be designed to accommodate a range of targets and target scales, as described here. The interface location between the target and the NCTS cryostat is at the target base / gripper joint, the tamping gas gland/gland joint, and the electrical plug/receptacle joint.

The radiation hydrodynamics code Hydra is used to quantify the sensitivity of different NIF ignition point designs to several 3D effects. Each of the 48 NIF quads is included in the calculations and is allowed to have different power. With this model they studied the effect on imploded core symmetry of discrete laser spots (as opposed to idealized azimuthally-averaged rings) and random variations in laser power.

Recent ignition target design effort has emphasized systematic exploration of the parameter space of possible ignition targets, providing as specific as possible comparisons between the various targets. This is to provide guidance for target fabrication R & D, and for the other elements of the ignition program. Targets are being considered that span 250-300 eV drive temperatures, capsule energies from 150 to 600 kJ, cocktail and gold hohlraum spectra, and three ablator materials (Be[Cu], CH[Ge], and polyimide). Capsules with graded doped beryllium ablators are being found to be very stable with respect to short-wavelength Rayleigh-Taylor growth. Sensitivity to ablator roughness, ice roughness, and asymmetry is being explored, as it depends on ablator material, drive temperature, and absorbed energy. Special features being simulated include fill holes, fill tubes, and capsule support tents. Three-dimensional simulations are being used to ensure adequate radiation symmetry in 3D, and to ensure that coupling of 3D asymmetry and 3D Rayleigh-Taylor does not adversely affect planned performance. Integrated 3D hohlraum simulations indicate that 3D features in the laser illumination pattern affect the hohlraums' performance, and the hohlraum is being redesigned to accommodate these effects.

The central goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is demonstration of controlled thermonuclear ignition. The mainline ignition target is a low-Z, single-shell cryogenic capsule designed to have weakly nonlinear Rayleigh-Taylor growth of surface perturbations. Double-shell targets are an alternative design concept that avoids the complexity of cryogenic preparation but has greater physics uncertainties associated with performance-degrading mix. A typical double-shell design involves a high-Z inner capsule filled with DT gas and supported within a low-Z ablator shell. The largest source of uncertainty for this target is the degree of highly evolved nonlinear mix on the inner surface of the high-Z shell. High Atwood numbers and feed-through of strong outer surface perturbation growth to the inner surface promote high levels of instability. The main challenge of the double-shell target designs is controlling the resulting nonlinear mix to levels that allow ignition to occur. Design and analysis of a suite of indirect-drive NIF double-shell targets with hohlraum temperatures of 200 eV and 250 eV are presented. Analysis of these targets includes assessment of two-dimensional radiation asymmetry as well as nonlinear mix. Two-dimensional integrated hohlraum simulations indicate that the x-ray illumination can be adjusted to provide adequate symmetry control in hohlraums specially designed to have high laser-coupling efficiency [Suter et al., Phys. Plasmas 5, 2092 (2000)]. These simulations also reveal the need to diagnose and control localized 10-15 keV x-ray emission from the high-Z hohlraum wall because of strong absorption by the high-Z inner shell. Preliminary estimates of the degree of laser backscatter from an assortment of laser-plasma interactions suggest comparatively benign hohlraum conditions. Application of a variety of nonlinear mix models and phenomenological tools, including buoyancy-drag models, multimode simulations and fall-line optimization, indicates a possibility of achieving ignition, i.e., fusion yields greater than 1 MJ. Planned experiments on the Omega laser to test current understanding of high-energy radiation flux asymmetry and mix-induced yield degradation in double-shell targets are described.

The goal of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is to produce significant thermonuclear burn from a target driven with a laser or ion beam. To achieve that goal, the national ICF Program has proposed a laser capable of producing ignition and intermediate gain. The facility is called the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This article describes ignition targets designed for the NIF and their modeling. Although the baseline NIF target design, described herein, is indirect drive, the facility will also be capable of doing direct-drive ignition targets - currently being developed at the University of Rochester.

Inertial confinement fusion capsules are critically dependent on the integrity of their hot spots to ignite. At the time of ignition, only a certain fractional perturbation of the nominally spherical hot spot boundary can be tolerated and the capsule still achieve ignition. The degree to which the expected hot spot perturbation in any given capsule design is less than this maximum tolerable perturbation is a measure of the ignition margin or robustness of that design. Moreover, since there will inevitably be uncertainties in the initial character and implosion dynamics of any given capsule, all of which can contribute to the eventual hot spot perturbation, quantifying the robustness of that capsule against a range of parameter variations is an important consideration in the capsule design. Here, the robustness of the 300 eV indirect drive target design for the National Ignition Facility [J.D. Lindl, et al., Phys. Plasmas 11, 339 (2004)] is studied in the parameter space of inner ice roughness, implosion velocity, and capsule scale. A suite of two thousand two-dimensional simulations, run with the radiation hydrodynamics code Lasnex, is used as the data base for the study. For each scale, an ignition region in the two remaining variables is identified and the ignition cliff is mapped. In accordance with the theoretical arguments of Levedahl and Lindl [Nucl. Fusion 37, 165 (1997)] and Kishony and Shvarts [Phys. Plasmas 8, 4925 (2001)], the location of this cliff is fitted to a power law of the capsule implosion velocity and scale. It is found that the cliff can be quite well represented in this power law form, and, using this scaling law, an assessment of the overall (one- and two-dimensional) ignition margin of the design can be made. The effect on the ignition margin of an increase or decrease in the density of the target fill gas is also assessed.