Recent experimental results on Nova

Summary form only given. A National Academy of Science Review Committee on inertial confinement fusion has endorsed a 12-point technical contract for the Nova program. Recent experiments have achieved a substantial number of these goals. The ten-beam laser has now been operated with the rms power balance among the ten beams as low as 8% in the foot and 5% in the peak of a high-energy, temporally shaped pulse. A decrease in the level of plasma instabilities from large scale length, low density plasma has been demonstrated by the use of random phase plates. Neutron measurements have been used to demonstrate high densities in well-understood implosions. A detailed understanding of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability at the ablation front of X-ray drive planar foil targets, with large hydrodynamic growth factors, has been demonstrated.