Speaker
Description
NIF's 2022 ignition demonstration, built on diagnostic techniques shared with OMEGA, established a mature suite of implosion diagnostics — neutron time-of-flight and imaging, gated x-ray radiography, VISAR, Compton radiography, and nuclear activation spectrometry — suited to single, richly instrumented shots fired at most a few times per day. Inertial fusion energy (IFE) demands a different paradigm, reached not in one leap but through an intermediate stage.
A key intermediate goal is diagnostics for a facility at the scale envisioned by Europe's HiPER+ roadmap: a direct-drive research centre operating at hundreds of kilojoules and elevated repetition rates, well short of the ~10 Hz, >100 MJ regime of a commercial plant. Such a facility must retain NIF/OMEGA-level diagnostic precision for mix, drive symmetry, and hydrodynamic instabilities while beginning to operate under radiation loading and repeated firing that present single-shot instrumentation cannot support.
This talk surveys that transition: which existing diagnostic concepts adapt with modest re-engineering to a HiPER+-scale facility, which require new radiation-hardened, higher-repetition-rate detectors, and what further development separates such an intermediate facility from the diagnostic suite needed for a demonstration power plant.