Our collaborator, Arianna Gleason (SLAC), has been leading a campaign on ultrafast imaging of the collapse of small voids. Small voids are found as material defects in ablator layer of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets, and they hydrodynamically interfere with the convergence of the target so the fuel doesn’t get up to the desired pressure and density. However, since it happens so fast, it’s really hard to see this shock-void interaction detail — enter LCLS + ultrafast x-ray imaging.
The campaign just produced its first papers: Silvia Pandolfi, a postdoc at Stanford, just published a paper on the target fab process for the campaign (Review of Scientific Instruments), and Daniel Hodge, a grad student at BYU, just published a paper about the imaging and the post-processing (Optics Express). Congrats to them both! You can find Kelin’s xRAGE simulations and synthetic PCI images in Daniel’s paper.