ITEP conception of a heavy ion fusion facility

A conceptual scheme is presented which combines self-consistently a hohlraum target design at the input energy Edr = 10 MJ with a scheme for a charge-symmetric heavy ion driver capable of producing the pulse power profile and the focal spot size required for target ignition and high energy gain. The physical issues underlying the key aspects of the target performance are put together into a coherent theoretical scheme which allows the target parameters to be rescaled to other values of Edr. Special attention is paid to the method of pulse shaping in the final stages of beam compression by taking advantage of four different platinum isotopes employed in the driver scheme. It is found that a heavy ion fusion facility designed along the same lines for a considerably lower input energy Edr ≈ 2 MJ would require a power pulse of 2.5–3 ns, which appears to be prohibitively short for present accelerator technology.