LMJ & PETAL status and program overview

Abstract

Since the operational commissioning of the LMJ in October 2014, with the first bundle of eight beams, several experimental campaigns have been achieved. They have proven the good performance of LMJ and demonstrated its aptitudes to achieve experiments for the Simulation Program. Six experimental configurations have been defined during the ramp-up of LMJ till the completion of the facility with 176 beams and more than 30 diagnostics. This gradual phase permit to explore some of the experimental topics of the Simulation program: hohlraum energetics, radiation transport, fundamental data, implosion hydrodynamics, hydrodynamic instabilities, and fusion studies. To complete the experimental capabilities of LMJ, a PW beam, PETAL, has been added to the LMJ's beams. PETAL offers a combination of a very high intensity multi-petawatt beam, synchronized with the nanosecond beams of the LMJ. This combination expands the LMJ experimental field in high energy density physics (HEDP). LMJ-PETAL is open to the academic communities for 20%-30% of the operating time; the first experiments have been performed in 2017.