4 research outputs found
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Reducing deuterium-tritium ice roughness by electrical heating of the saturated vapor
High gain targets for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) contain a layer of deuterium-tritium (DT) ice which surrounds a volume of DT gas in thermal equilibrium with the solid. The roughness of the cryogenic fuel layer inside of ICF targets is one of the sources of imperfections which cause implosions to deviate from perfect one dimensional performance. Experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have shown that applying a heat flux across the inner surface of a hydrogen layer such as that inside an ICF target reduces the intrinsic roughness of the surface. We have developed a technique to generate this heat flux by applying and electric field to the DT vapor in the center of these shells. This vapor has a small but significant conductivity due to ionization caused by beta decay of tritium in the vapor and the solid. We describe here experiments using a 1.15 GHz cavity to apply an electric field to frozen DT inside of a sapphire test cell. The cell and cavity geometry allows visual observation of the frozen layers
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Nuclear spin polarization of solid deuterium-tritium
It appears that parallel alignment of deuteron and triton magnetic moments increases the cross section of the nuclear reaction T(d,n) He/sup 4/ by 50%, thereby promising a laser driver of perhaps half the original energy. Both ''brute-force'' and dynamic nuclear polarization are considered, and the many potential problems of the latter are considered. High nuclear polarization by the dynamic technique requires a small nucleus-to-unpaired electron ratio, a long longitudinal nuclear relaxation time and a short longitudinal electron relaxation time. Normal D-T is shown to be inadequate, and enriched and possibly very pure molecular DT will be required. The key variable is the nuclear relaxation time, which can either depend on the interaction with rotationally excited impurity molecules or on paramagnetic defects formed by the tritium radiation. Radiation-induced DT decomposition and rotational catalysis will combat one another to affect the DT purity. The expected atom density and fractionation effects are considered. There exists one frequency at which both D and T atoms can be pumped
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Forming and smoothing D{sub 2} and HD layers for ICF by infra-red heating
We describe a technique to form and smooth uniform solid D{sub 2}, HD or DT layers for inertial confinement fusion targets. Pumping the infrared (IR) collision induced vibration-rotation band generates a bulk heating of the solid. Shadowgraphs reveal that this bulk heat quickly redistributes the solid into a relatively uniform layer depending on the IR intensity profile. Measured redistribution time constants are used to determine the conversion efficiency of IR light into bulk heat. Phase shifting interferometry reveals that the surface roughness decreases with increasing IR heating