Recent Developments in Fabrication of New Conceptual Gold Cone and Machining of Polystyrene Shell for Fast Ignition Target

Recent developments of several key issues for fabrication techniques of cone and shell target for the first phase of the Fast Ignition Realization Experiment (FIREX-I) project at the Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University, are described in this paper. The most important modification of the target design is a double cone, and a new fabrication technique has been developed. Although the error of assembling the cones is still several microns, the first prototype of a double-cone target with a vacuum gap of 20 m was successfully provided for the preliminary experiment. Additionally, Ti:sapphire laser machining was used to bore a hole in the polystyrene shell.