Background Rates Outside the OMEGA-60 Target Chamber Seconds to Minutes After a High-Yield Shot

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Date
2022-04-27Event
OMEGA Laser User’s Group Meeting, Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Rochester, NY, April 27, 2022; 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, Pittsburgh, PA, November 8-12, 2021.Abstract
Inertial confinement fusion may be used to make fundamental nuclear science measurements of low-energy light-ion cross sections also of interest in astrophysics and fusion research. The feasibility of collecting and counting the beta decay of the reaction products (half-life 20 ms to 20 s) in the expanding neutral gas after the ICF shot is being studied using two types of “traps” – a getter and a turbopump. Both of these use phoswich detectors to identify beta particles and count the beta decays of the trapped product nuclei. One concern with this technique is that the background rate, even relatively long after the shot, may still be too high relative to the small number of detected product nuclei. An OMEGA ride-along experiment was performed to measure the background rates in these detectors from milliseconds to seconds after the laser shot.
Funded in part by a grant from the DOE through the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and by SUNY Geneseo and Houghton College.
Author
Raymond, Steven
Kowalewski, Tyler
Yuly, Mark
Padalino, Stephen
Forrest, Chad J.
Sangster, Craig
Regan, Sean