The crucial role of diagnostics in achieving ignition on the National Ignition Facility (NIF)

Well over 100 diagnostics can operate on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) as a result of several decades of development on NIF, and before that on Nova, OMEGA, and earlier LLNL lasers. A subset of these have guided the approach to achieving ignition on the NIF in 2022 [H. Abu-Shawareb et al. (Indirect Drive ICF Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 129(7), 075001 (2022)]. Achieving ignition on NIF has required many types of experiments with this core set of diagnostics, some constraining known unknowns and some revealing surprises—arguably unknown unknowns. Early design work realized that the extreme precision required for ignition on NIF would require fine-tuning by experiment, that is, measuring and adjusting known unknowns. Many examples are given where the use of the core set of ignition diagnostics in experimental arrangements called platforms demonstrated control of the key theoretical parameters defined as shape, adiabat, velocity, and mix. The direction of the adjustments to input conditions is found either by trend analysis or, in many cases, by observing from the diagnostic data the direction to make an adjustment. In addition, diagnostics have revealed some unexpected or neglected known issues, which degrade performance, or unexpected issues, unknown unknowns. Some of these factors had been previously considered, but underestimated or difficult to calculate at the time. The overall methodology can be described as a variant of Popper's falsifiability philosophy [K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Hutchinson, 1974)]. This paper summarizes the role of ignition diagnostics in terms of falsification or validation of theory or experimental setup as well as uncovering unexpected issues. The journey to ignition started in the seventies with a 1-µm wavelength laser producing disastrous results. Diagnostics have guided us to the recent multi-decadal goal of demonstrating ignition and burn in the laboratory.