Marshall N. Rosenbluth Ph.D. Thesis Award: Alpha-heating analysis of burning plasma experiments on the National Ignition Facility and their companion dudded fuel implosions.

In indirect drive inertial confinement fusion, a cryogenic layer of deuterium and tritium is compressed to high pressures and temperatures via irradiation by x-rays from a laser-driven hohlraum.At stagnation, the final fuel assembly consists of a relatively low density (~ 100 g/cc) and high temperature (~10 keV) “hot spot” confined by the relatively cooler (~ 1 keV) and denser (~1000 g/cc) “shell”.Last year, ignition was achieved in the laboratory for the first time whereby alpha particle heating of the hot spot propagated a burn wave into the dense shell.Here, we present a comprehensive analysis of the alpha-heating levels in this experiment which includes quantifying both the Lawson parameter and the fusion yield enhancement due to this alpha particle self-heating.We also report on a series of follow-up experiments where the DT fuel was replaced with a THD duded fuel mixture to measure the fusion yield output in the absence of alpha particle self-heating.

* Work performed under the auspices of the U.S. D.O.E. under Award No. DE-NA0003856 and by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344.

1. R. Christopherson, D. J. Schlossberg, S. A. MacLaren, A. B. Zylstra, A. L. Kritcher, O. A. Hurricane, B. Kustowski, O.L. Landen, A. Pak, J. E. Ralph, J. S. Ross, B. Bachmann, K. L. Baker, D. Hinkel, R. M. Bionta, D. T. Casey, L. Divol, D. N. Fittinghoff, E. P. Hartouni, M. Hohenberger, P. Patel, S. F. Khan, A. S. Moore, K. Newman, M. S. Rubery, C. R. Weber, C. V. Young, J. Salmonson, J. D. Lindl, R. Nora, J. Milovich, D. Munro, D. Strozzi, E. Marley, R. Tran, and the NIF team, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, M. Gatu Johnson,Massachusetts Institute of Technology ,N. W. Birge, K. Meaney, Los Alamos National Laboratory