Diagnostic technology development for NIF by LLNL experimental programs

Summary form only given. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is under construction at LLNL for the Department of Energy Stockpile Stewardship Program. It is used for experiments for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Ignition, High Energy Density (HED) science, and basic science. The ICF and HED programs at LLNL have formed diagnostic research and development groups to institute improvements outside the charter of facility diagnostics. We present data from instrumentation and associated technology that is being developed by these groups. A major portion of our instrumentation work is improvements to detectors and readout systems. We have several efforts related to CCD device development. Work has been done in collaboration with the University of Arizona to back-thinned a large format CCD device (36 mm/sup 2/). We have developed in collaboration with a commercial vendor a large format, compact, Ethernet addressable CCD camera system. We have coupled our large format CCD system to an MK2 Kentech X-ray streak tube leading to improvements in resolution and dynamic range. Similar improvements have been made to the LLNL optical streak camera systems. We also discuss gate-width and uniformity improvements to MCP-based framing cameras. We will also discuss gate-width and uniformity improvements to MCP-based framing cameras. Finally, we present data from single shot high-speed, high dynamic range data link work and discuss technology aimed at improvements of dynamic range for 1-6 GHz high-speed transient measurements from remote locations.