The impact of target parameters on the collision process and hot-spot performance in the double-cone ignition scheme

The density distribution, temperature, and asymmetry of the stagnated plasmas in inertial confinement fusion are crucially important for fusion performance and influencing the energy coupling efficiency from heating laser to hot-spot in the fast ignition scheme. In the double-cone ignition scheme, the fuel is compressed and accelerated in a pair of gold cones, ejected out, and collided with each other to form the stagnated plasmas. To investigate the impact of target parameter variations on the stagnated plasmas, the evolutions of intensities, sizes, and shapes of the self-emission signals were analyzed. The observation result shows that the material of the shell significantly affects the ejecting velocity and self-emission signal intensity, and the distance between the geometric centers of the gold cones influences the emission intensity and sizes. According to analytical calculations, changing the geometric center's distance can not only improve the temperature and heating performance of the collided plasmas but can also reduce the areal density of the fuel.