With European Laser Facilities such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) and the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields (HIBEF) scheduled to come online within the next couple of years, General Atomics, as a major supplier of targets and target components for the High Energy Density Physics community in the United States, is gearing up to meet their demand for large numbers of low cost targets. Using the production of a subassembly for the National Ignition Facility’s fusion targets as an example, we demonstrate that through automation of assembly tasks, the design of targets and their experimental setup can be fairly complex while keeping the assembly time and cost as a minimum. A six-axis Mitsubishi robot is used in combination with vision feedback and a force–torque sensor to assemble target subassemblies of different scales and designs with minimal change of tooling, allowing for design flexibility and short assembly setup times. Implementing automated measurement routines on a Nikon NEXIV microscope further reduces the effort required for target metrology, while electronic data collection and transfer complete a streamlined target production operation that can be adapted to a large variety of target designs.

A new inverse Compton scattering scheme for production of high-energy Gamma-ray sources is proposed in which a Giga-electronvolt (GeV) electron beam is injected into a thermal hohlraum. It is found that by increasing the hohlraum background temperature, the scattered photons experience kinematic pileup, resulting in more monochromatic spectrum and smaller scattering angle. When a relativistic electron beam with energy 1 GeV and charge 10nC is injected into a 0.5 keV hohlraum, 80% of the scattered photons have energy above 0.5 GeV.

Laser technology developments, including construction of a 286-TW Ti:Sapphire laser with a focused intensity of 1021W/cm2, installation of the TIL, prototype of the SG-III, and operation of the SG-II laser are presented. Results of the experiments on hohlraum physics, indirect-drive implosion, Thomson scattering, EOS, and X-ray laser are briefly introduced. Simulations and a code package, LARED, for target physics are outlined.

In this article, we study the effect of various parameters on the estimation of radiation temperature inside an indirect drive ICF hohlraum and also study the hydrodynamics of aluminum and gold foils driven by the hohlraum radiation. A multigroup one-dimensional, radiation hydrodynamic code is used for this study. Opacities are calculated using a screened hydrogenic average atom model. We also investigate the opacities of Au-Sm and Au-Gd mixtures. It is shown that the mixing of two high Z materials can lead to an enhancement in the Rosseland means, which is of direct interest in indirect-drive inertial confinement fusion. The radiation temperature inside a cylindrical hohlraum is seen to be strongly dependent on the number of frequency groups used. One group radiation transport underpredicts the radiation temperature. It is shown that erroneous results can be obtained if the space mesh in the hohlraum wall is not fine enough. The spectrum of the radiation inside the hohlraum is seen to be different from Planck, especially in the high-energy range. This may lead to preheating of the target. Hydrodynamics of an aluminum foil driven by the hohlraum radiation is also presented in this article. A scaling law for the radiation-driven shock-wave speed in the gold foil is obtained.