Performance Modeling of the NIF Neutron Imaging System

Summary form only given. The Neutron Imaging System (MS) for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is currently under development. The system should be able to record hot-spot (13-15 MeV) and cold-fuel (6-10 MeV) images with a resolution of 10 microns and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 10 at the 20% contour. This diagnostic is valuable because lower energy neutrons reveal the distribution of the non-burning DT fuel surrounding the hot-spot, providing key information in the case of a failed implosion. An End-to-End model of the system has been developed to study the performance of different designs with respect to the resolution and SNR requirements. The model includes accurate source distributions of a failed implosion, five aperture geometries (ring, penumbral, square pinhole, small penumbral pinhole and triangular wedge), their associated point spread functions, and a pixelated plastic scintillator detector array. The simulated recorded images are deconvolved using a modified regularization algorithm, producing overall simulations of the expected source images.