Recent advances in near-term laser-fusion target design

Advances in near-term laser-driven fusion pellet design are described. We report the addition of angle dependent absorption and the introduction of a new formulation of the ponderomotive force. The first application of the Incomplete Cholesky-Conjugate Gradient iterative matrix solution method to the LASNEX radiation diffusion package is discussed. A brief overview of experimental results relevant to target simulation is given. We compare LASNEX calculations with recently published Soviet pellet design calculations. Finally, we discuss optimization of exploding pusher targets at 20 TW