Measurements of direct drive laser imprint in thin foils by XUV radiography using an X-ray laser backlighter

In direct drive inertial confinement fusion, the residual speckle pattern remaining after beam smoothing plays an important role in the seeding of instabilities at the ablation front. We have used an x-ray laser as an XUV backlighter to characterize the imprinted modulation in thin foils for smoothing by random phase plate and spectral dispersion at both 0.35 pm and 0.53 pm irradiation, and induced spatial incoherence at 0.53 pm irradiation. We also demonstrate measurements of the modulation due to a single mode optical imprint generated by a narrow slit interference pattern, and modification of the imprint with a superposed smooth irradiation to study time dependence of the imprinting process. 8 refs., 10 figs

XUV radiography measurements of direct drive imprint in thin aluminum foils using a Ge x-ray laser on Vulcan

One key aspect for high gain direct drive inertial confinement fusion is the imprint of perturbations in the outer surface of a capsule due to nonuniformities in the direct laser illumination of the capsule. Direct drive implosions are achieved by uniformly irradiating the outside surface of a hollow spherical capsule that contains a layer of fusionable D-T on its inner surface. The intensity of laser irradiation is down with a low intensity ``foot`` at 10{sup 13} W/cm{sup 2} for several nanoseconds before it builds up to more than 10{sup 15} W/cm{sup 2} during the main drive portion of the pulse. Laser ablation of the capsule surface produces a high pressure that accelerates the capsule shell radially inward in a spherical implosion. During this acceleration, perturbations due to surface roughness and due to imprint from spatial nonuniformities in the laser irradiation undergo Rayleigh-Taylor growth, potentially severely degrading performance. Our interest is in studying the imprint process and subsequent Rayleigh-Taylor growth of perturbations in a foil target that is irradiated by a low intensity laser speckle pattern. Previous experiments have been done to study laser imprint with an x-ray laser backlighter at the Nova laser using 0.35 micrometer laser irradiation of a 3 micrometer Si foil. In these experiments we irradiated a 2 micrometer thick Al foil with 0.53 micrometer laser light at 2-8 {times} 10{sup 12} W/cm{sup 2} using the Vulcan laser. We used a Ge x-ray laser as an XUV backlighter to measure the modulation in optical depth of the foil on a CCD during the initial imprint phase and after Rayleigh-Taylor growth with different laser smoothing schemes. 4 refs., 6 figs

Laser plasma diagnostics of dense plasmas

The authors describe several experiments on Nova that use laser-produced plasmas to generate x-rays capable of backlighting dense, cold plasmas (p {approximately} 1--3 gm/cm{sup 3}, kT {approximately} 5--10 eV, and areal density {rho}{ell}{approximately} 0.01--0.05 g/cm{sup 2}). The x-rays used vary over a wide range of h{nu}, from 80 eV (X-ray laser) to 9 keV. This allows probing of plasmas relevant to many hydrodynamic experiments. Typical diagnostics are 100 ps pinhole framing cameras for a long pulse backlighter and a time-integrated CCD camera for a short pulse backlighter

Review of progress in Fast Ignition

Copyright 2005 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Physics of Plasmas, 12(5), 057305, 2005 and may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.187124

Eigenmodes and growth rates of relativistic current filamentation instability in a collisional plasma

I theoretically found eigenmodes and growth rates of relativistic current filamentation instability in collisional regimes, deriving a generalized dispersion relation from self-consistent beam-Maxwell equations. For symmetrically counterstreaming, fully relativistic electron currents, the collisional coupling between electrons and ions creates the unstable modes of growing oscillation and wave, which stand out for long-wavelength perturbations. In the stronger collisional regime, the growing oscillatory mode tends to be dominant for all wavelengths. In the collisionless limit, those modes vanish, while maintaining another purely growing mode that exactly coincides with a standard relativistic Weibel mode. It is also shown that the effects of electron-electron collisions and thermal spread lower the growth rate of the relativistic Weibel instability. The present mechanisms of filamentation dynamics are essential for transport of homogeneous electron beam produced by the interaction of high power laser pulses with plasma.Comment: 44 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Generation of ultrabright beams in high energy Nd:glass and KrF laser systems

The development of ultrabright lasers is progressing rapidly particularly in the direction of table-top-terawatt systems operating at high pulse repetition rate with relatively low pulse energy. The highest pulse energies and highest absolute powers are being generated by the adaptation of larger-scale high energy laser systems operating in single pulse mode. The maximum focused intensity from either type of laser is determined by the beam brightness B which can be expressed in units of Watts cm where P is the power, lambda the wavelength and S the Strehl ratio, quantifying the ratio of brightness in a beam with less than diffraction limited quality to that in a diffraction limited beam

Fine-mapping of prostate cancer susceptibility loci in a large meta-analysis identifies candidate causal variants

Prostate cancer is a polygenic disease with a large heritable component. A number of common, low-penetrance prostate cancer risk loci have been identified through GWAS. Here we apply the Bayesian multivariate variable selection algorithm JAM to fine-map 84 prostate cancer susceptibility loci, using summary data from a large European ancestry meta-analysis. We observe evidence for multiple independent signals at 12 regions and 99 risk signals overall. Only 15 original GWAS tag SNPs remain among the catalogue of candidate variants identified; the remainder are replaced by more likely candidates. Biological annotation of our credible set of variants indicates significant enrichment within promoter and enhancer elements, and transcription factor-binding sites, including AR, ERG and FOXA1. In 40 regions at least one variant is colocalised with an eQTL in prostate cancer tissue. The refined set of candidate variants substantially increase the proportion of familial relative risk explained by these known susceptibility regions, which highlights the importance of fine-mapping studies and has implications for clinical risk profiling. © 2018 The Author(s).Prostate cancer is a polygenic disease with a large heritable component. A number of common, low-penetrance prostate cancer risk loci have been identified through GWAS. Here we apply the Bayesian multivariate variable selection algorithm JAM to fine-map 84 prostate cancer susceptibility loci, using summary data from a large European ancestry meta-analysis. We observe evidence for multiple independent signals at 12 regions and 99 risk signals overall. Only 15 original GWAS tag SNPs remain among the catalogue of candidate variants identified; the remainder are replaced by more likely candidates. Biological annotation of our credible set of variants indicates significant enrichment within promoter and enhancer elements, and transcription factor-binding sites, including AR, ERG and FOXA1. In 40 regions at least one variant is colocalised with an eQTL in prostate cancer tissue. The refined set of candidate variants substantially increase the proportion of familial relative risk explained by these known susceptibility regions, which highlights the importance of fine-mapping studies and has implications for clinical risk profiling. © 2018 The Author(s).Peer reviewe