Compression and Burning of a Thermonuclear Target upon Shock Ignition under the Conditions of Laser Beam Irradiation Symmetry Violation

The influence of heating homogeneity violations in a laser thermonuclear target designed for shock ignition on the target compression and burning has been studied. We have performed our studies based on two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations when modeling the target heating homogeneity violations due to various factors of symmetry violation of the target irradiation by a finite number of laser beams. The gains have been calculated at various perturbation amplitudes of the spatial distribution of absorbed energy in the target for two characteristic cases—low and high dominant perturbation modes. The first and second cases refer, respectively, to the factors of regular irradiation homogeneity violation due to a finite number of laser beams and a target offset from the focusing point and the factors of stochastic irradiation homogeneity violation related to laser beam energy imbalance, beam mispointing, and beam mistiming. We show that for a target designed for shock ignition the factors of regular irradiation homogeneity violation are much more dangerous than those for a spark ignition target.