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