Fabrication and Characterization of Beryllium Rayleigh-Taylor Targets for OMEGA Experiments

Rayleigh-Taylor experiments have been designed for the OMEGA laser facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) of the University of Rochester to explore perturbations during implosion of this ablator. For the experiment to be relevant, the beryllium copper flat used as the target must be similar in chemical makeup and morphology to the NIF ignition target. To visualize the perturbation growth, the flats were fabricated with sinusoidal perturbations on one side of a wavelength of 50 m and amplitude of 0.25 m. The flats were doped with more copper than required in the NIF ablator specification to increase the x-ray optical depth during burn through. These flats were successfully fabricated using a mold technique. This technique, as well as the characterization techniques used to verify the chemical makeup and thicknesses, will be described in this paper.