Injection of laser fusion pellets. Part I. Accuracy required, acceleration, and residual gas deflections

In order to position a pellet within a laser fusion power plant reactor chamber accurately enough so that sufficient light will illuminate the desired portions of the pellet, one must know for the pellet: the positional accuracy required, the accelerations (structurally) permissible, and the perturbing effect on the pellet trajectory of residual gas motion. This report purports to answer these questions by a number of representative calculations. It is found that neither positional accuracies, typical pellet structure, available pellet accelerations, nor the highest expected chamber gas densities (nor the lowest) permitted by efficient laser beam transport, are any restraint upon pellet insertion save at high repetition rates (greater than 10/s) when the other parameters have latitude for, and require (at least some) optimization