Early stage of implosion in inertial confinement fusion: Shock timing and perturbation evolution

Excessive increase in the shell entropy and degradation from spherical symmetry in inertial confinement fusion implosions limit shell compression and could impede ignition. The entropy is controlled by accurately timing shock waves launched into the shell at an early stage of an implosion. The seeding of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability, the main source of the asymmetry growth, is also set at early times during the shock transit across the shell. In this paper we model the shock timing and early perturbation growth of directly driven targets measured on the OMEGA laser system [T. R. Boehly et al., Opt. Commun. 133, 495 (1997)]. By analyzing the distortion evolution, it is shown that one of the main parameters characterizing the growth is the size of the conduction zone Dc, defined as a distance between the ablation front and the laser deposition region. Modes with kDc>1 are stable and experience oscillatory behavior [V. N. Goncharov, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 2091 (1999)]. The model shows that the main stabilizing mechanism is the dynamic overpressure due to modulations in the blow-off velocity inside the conduction zone. The long wavelengths with kDc<1 experience growth because of coupled Richtmyer-Meshkov-like and Landau-Darrieus instabilities [L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz, Fluid Mechanics (Pergamon, New York, 1982)]. To match the simulation results with both the shock timing and perturbation growth measurements a new nonlocal thermal transport model is developed and used in hydrocodes.