Comparison of implosion core metrics: A 10 ps dilation X-ray imager vs a 100 ps gated microchannel plate

S R Nagel; L R Benedetti; D K Bradley; T J Hilsabeck; N Izumi; S Khan; G A Kyrala; T Ma; A Pak

doi:10.1063/1.4959917

Comparison of implosion core metrics: A 10 ps dilation X-ray imager vs a 100 ps gated microchannel plate

Rev Sci Instrum. 2016 Nov;87(11):11E311. doi: 10.1063/1.4959917.

Authors

S R Nagel¹, L R Benedetti¹, D K Bradley¹, T J Hilsabeck², N Izumi¹, S Khan¹, G A Kyrala³, T Ma¹, A Pak¹

Affiliations

¹ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, California 94550, USA.
² General Atomics, P.O. Box 85608, San Diego, California 92186-5608, USA.
³ Los Alamos National Laboratory, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87507, USA.

PMID: 27910406
DOI: 10.1063/1.4959917

Abstract

The dilation x-ray imager (DIXI) [T. J. Hilsabeck et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 81, 10E317 (2010); S. R. Nagel et al., ibid. 83, 10E116 (2012); S. R. Nagel et al., ibid. 85, 11E504 (2014)] is a high-speed x-ray framing camera that uses the pulse-dilation technique to achieve a temporal resolution of less than 10 ps. This is a 10 × improvement over conventional framing cameras currently employed on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) (100 ps resolution), and otherwise only achievable with 1D streaked imaging. A side effect of the dramatically reduced gate width is the comparatively lower detected signal level. Therefore we implement a Poisson noise reduction with non-local principal component analysis method [J. Salmon et al., J. Math. Imaging Vision 48, 279294 (2014)] to improve the robustness of the DIXI data analysis. Here we present results on ignition-relevant experiments at the NIF using DIXI. In particular we focus on establishing that/when DIXI gives reliable shape metrics (P₀, P₂, and P₄ Legendre modes, and their temporal evolution/swings).