Experimental observation of ionization and shock fronts in foamtargets driven by thermal radiation

• Published in: Chinese physics B 2010 (2), p.342-346
• Main Author: 张继彦 杨家敏 江少恩 李永升 杨国洪 丁耀南 黄翼翔 胡昕
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 塑料泡沫; 实验观察; 激光加热; 激光照射; 辐射带; 辐射流体力学; 间接驱动惯性约束聚变
• ISSN: 1674-1056; 2058-3834

The behaviours of ionization and shock propagation in radiatively heated material is crucial for the understanding of indirect drive inertial confinement fusion as well as some astrophysics phenomena. In this work, radiation field with a peak temperature of up to 155 eV was generated in a gold cavity heated by four laser beams on the SG-II laser system and was used to irradiate a plastic foam cylinder at one end. The radiatively ablated foam cylinder was then backlighted side-on by x-ray from a laser-irradiated Ti disk. By observing the transmission decrease due to the shock compression of the foam cylinder, the trajectories of shock front were measured, and from the onset of the intense thermal emission from the side of the cylinder, the propagations of the ionization front were also observed on the same shot. The experimental measurements were compared to predictions of the radiation hydrodynamics code Multi-1D and reasonable agreements were found.