Time- and space-resolved spectroscopy of dynamic hohlraum interiors

A dynamic hohlraum is created when an annular z-pinch plasma implodes onto a cylindrical 0.014 g/cc 6-mm-diameter CH₂ foam. The impact launches a radiating shock that propagates toward the axis at 350 μm/ns. The radiation trapped by the tungsten z-pinch plasma forms a 200 eV hohlraum that provides X-rays for indirect drive inertial confinement fusion capsule implosion experiments. We are developing the ability to diagnose the hohlraum interior using emission and absorption spectroscopy of Si atoms added as a tracer to the central portion of the foam. Time- and space-resolved Si spectra are recorded with an elliptical crystal spectrometer viewing the cylindrical hohlraum end-on. A rectangular aperture at the end of the hohlraum restricts the field of view so that the 1D spectrometer resolution corresponds approximately to the hohlraum radial direction. This enables distinguishing between spectra from the unshocked radiation-heated foam and from the shocked foam. Typical spectral lines observed include the Si Lyα with its He-like satellites and the He-like resonance sequence including Heα, Heβ, and Heγ, along with some of their associated Li-like satellites. Work is in progress to infer the hohlraum conditions using collisional–radiative modeling that accounts for the radiation environment and includes both opacity effects and detailed Stark broadening calculations. These 6-mm-scale radiation-heated plasmas might eventually also prove suitable for testing Stark broadening line profile calculations or for opacity measurements.     

Mass Measurements on Short-Lived Nuclides with ISOLTRAP

Penning trap mass spectrometry has reached a state that allows its application to very short-lived nuclides available from various sources of radioactive beams. Mass values with outstanding accuracy are achieved even far from stability. This paper illustrates the state of the art by summarizing the status of the ISOLTRAP experiment at ISOLDE/CERN. Furthermore, results of mass measurements on unstable rare earth isotopes will be given. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The temporal course of masking and the auditory filter shape

Recent experiments have shown that frequency selectivity measured in tone-on-tone simultaneous masking improves with increasing delay of a brief signal relative to the onset of a longer duration gated masker. To determine whether a similar improvement occurs for a notched-noise masker, threshold was measured for a 20-ms signal presented at the beginning, the temporal center, or the end of the 400-ms masker (simultaneous masking), or immediately following the masker (forward masking). The notch width was varied systematically and the notch was placed both symmetrically and asymmetrically about the 1-kHz signal frequency. Growth-of-masking functions were determined for each temporal condition, for a noise masker without a spectral notch. These functions were used to express the thresholds from the notched-noise experiment in terms of the level of a flat-spectrum noise which would produce the same threshold. In simultaneous masking the auditory filter shapes derived from the transformed data did not change significantly with signal delay, suggesting that the selectivity of the auditory filter does not develop over time. In forward masking the auditory filter shapes were sharper than those for simultaneous masking, particularly on the high-frequency side, which was attributed to suppression.