Reducing deuterium-tritium ice roughness by electrical heating of the saturated vapor

摘要

High gain targets for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) contain a layer of deuterium-tritium (DT) ice which surrounds a volume of DT gas in thermal equilibrium with the solid. The roughness of the cryogenic fuel layer inside of ICF targets is one of the sources of imperfections which cause implosions to deviate from perfect one dimensional performance. Experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have shown that applying a heat flux across the inner surface of a hydrogen layer such as that inside an ICF target reduces the intrinsic roughness of the surface. We have developed a technique to generate this heat flux by applying and electric field to the DT vapor in the center of these shells. This vapor has a small but significant conductivity due to ionization caused by beta decay of tritium in the vapor and the solid. We describe here experiments using a 1.15 GHz cavity to apply an electric field to frozen DT inside of a sapphire test cell. The cell and cavity geometry allows visual observation of the frozen layers.