Experimental and simulation studies on gold bubble movement in gas-filled hohlraums

A recent experiment on the Shenguang III laser facility has applied open-end gold hohlraums with two gas pressures to study the movement of a plasma bubble. Under a laser intensity and width close to those of an ignition main pulse, the bubbles possess radial scales from several hundred to one thousand micrometers. An x-ray framing camera is used to measure the N-band x-ray images generated from the gold bubble plasma at different moments, from which the edge positions of the expanding bubbles are accurately acquired. The experimental results are simulated by an optimized two-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic code. Based on the classical average atom (AA) model, two phenomenological coefficients C-er and C-op are introduced into the code to correct the bubble evolution. C-er artificially redistributes the energies between radiation and matter, and C-op correlatively adjusts the plasma opacity. The bubble movement simulated by the novel phenomenological model agrees better with the measured result than that by the AA model. This work plays a critical role in our code improvements and advances the reliability of the hohlraum design.