The historic December 5, 2022 experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility reached fusion energy ignition for the first time, thus paving the way to future clean inertial fusion energy (IFE). This project addresses one of the priority research opportunities in IFE – the development of alternate ablative target materials, which are urgently sought to achieve high gain (G>10) by enhancing fuel compression in low-adiabat implosions. 

The main objective of this ALCC project is to gain insight into the HED ablator physics of novel amorphous carbon (a-C) targets under compression by IFE drivers. Our scientific goals are: (1) to uncover the atomic-scale evolution of the a-C microstructure under shock compression, including potential phase transitions to diamond or metastable supercooled liquid carbon at high pressures and temperatures; (2) to accurately describe the complex states of carbon under conditions relevant to IFE and obtain high-quality EOS through a combination of experimental measurements and machine-learning molecular dynamics simulations. Our simulations at experimental time and length scales at DOE exascale supercomputers will guide experiments to observe predicted phenomena and validate our theoretical models. 

This ALCC project will deliver key information on novel a-C ablators for target and implosion designs using a-C ablators. The transformative science impact of this team's work is in harnessing the unprecedented power of extreme-scale quantum-accurate MD simulations on exascale Frontier and Aurora to predict novel physical phenomena and guide experiments towards observing them.