Kenneth Anderson

In direct-drive inertial confinement fusion, target offset from the target chamber center (or center of beam convergence) may lead to significant implosion asymmetry and fusion yield degradation. In addition, cross-beam energy transfer (CBET) has been shown to be a significant source of laser energy scattering and leads to a reduction in implosion velocity and yield. To improve energy coupling and implosion performance, several techniques for CBET mitigation have been proposed. Recent simulations, however, have shown that CBET also substantially mitigates the effect of target offset on implosion asymmetry and yield [Anderson et al., Phys. Plasmas 27, 112713 (2020)]. Furthermore, the inclusion of CBET models in radiation-hydrodynamics codes was shown to greatly improve agreement between simulations and experiments involving substantial target offset distances. This paper explores the intensity dependence of this CBET–offset effect. In addition, it is shown that enhanced sensitivity to target offset can be expected when CBET-mitigation techniques are used in direct-drive implosions. This is shown through simulations of two such CBET-mitigation techniques on the OMEGA laser: (1) decreased beam-to-target radius, and (2) beam-to-beam frequency detuning. For the typical target offset distances (<15 μm) observed in experiments on OMEGA, however, overall yield is still anticipated to be substantially higher when CBET-mitigation techniques are employed.