Implosion experiment of neutron yield in indirectly driven double-metal-shell target

This paper discusses early experiments on indirect laser-driven implosion of double-metal-shell targets conducted with a hundred-kilojoule-class laser facility. The design of the double-metal-shell target is derived from the volume ignition scheme, which decouples the radiation ablation and implosion compression processes, thereby improving the robustness of the implosion. However, due to the high difficulty in manufacturing the double-metal-shell target, the neutron yield in the initial experiments was much lower than expected from simulations. To address this issue, two key improvements are proposed: first, optimizing the joint design of the outer shell to reduce the impact of hydrodynamic instability, thus to improve the collision efficiency of the inner and outer shells and the implosion efficiency of the inner core; second, enhancing the coupling efficiency of the hohlraum-target to improve the effective transfer of laser energy. With these improvements, the compression performance and implosion efficiency of the target were significantly enhanced, resulting in a substantial increase in neutron yield, from 5.0\times 10^7 to 7.1\times 10^8 .