Design of a deuterium and tritium-ablator shock ignition target for the National Ignition Facility

Shock ignition presents a viable path to ignition and high gain on the National Ignition Facility (NIF). In this paper, we describe the development of the 1D design of 0.5MJ class, all-deuterium and tritium (fuel and ablator) shock ignition target that should be reasonably robust to Rayleigh-Taylor fluid instabilities, mistiming, and hot electron preheat. The target assumes "day one" NIF hardware and produces a yield of 31MJ with reasonable allowances for laser backscatter, absorption efficiency, and polar drive power variation. The energetics of polar drive laser absorption require a beam configuration with half of the NIF quads dedicated to launching the ignitor shock, while the remaining quads drive the target compression. Hydrodynamic scaling of the target suggests that gains of 75 and yields 70MJ may be possible. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4765354]