KCAT Performance Summary

High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) experiments play an important role in corroborating the improved physics codes that underlie LLNL's Stockpile Stewardship mission. Conducting these experiments, whether on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) or another national facility such as Omega, will require not only improvement in the diagnostics for measuring the experiment, but also detailed knowledge of the as-built target components and assemblies themselves. To assist in this effort, a defined set of well-known reference standards designed to represent a range of HEDP targets have been built and are being used to quantify the performance of different characterization techniques. Without the critical step of using reference standards for qualifying characterization tools there can be no verification of either commercial or internally-developed characterization techniques and thus an uncertainty in the input to the physics code models would exist.