Model Testing and Diagnostic Simulation of Implosion Experiments on the National Ignition Facility

Implosion experiments reach the most extreme high energy density states in the laboratory though the convergent amplification of shock waves and the stagnation of material. These systems are critical to a variety of applications including inertial confinement fusion and serve as the basis of fundamental physics platforms focusing on studying the behavior of matter at conditions relevant to the deep interior of celestial bodies. Diagnosing these experiments is challenging due to the lack of diagnostic access in spherical geometry leading to the primary measurements being self-emission of x-ray and particle radiation that is emitted at around peak convergence. These quantities encode information about the underlying mechanisms that lead to their generation but require sophisticated techniques to extract this information. This work describes how the code PYthon Radiation IMaging and Detection Simulation (PYRIMADS) can be used to test various proposed models for the behavior of an implosion experiment by fully simulating the diagnostic signatures that would be measured to compare against real data.

This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. IM release number LLNL-ABS-835827.