Ensemble simulations of inertial confinement fusion implosions

The achievement of inertial confinement fusion ignition on the National Ignition Facility relies on the collection and interpretation of a limited (and expensive) set of experimental data. These data are therefore supplemented with state‐of‐the‐art multidimensional radiation‐hydrodynamic simulations to provide a better understanding of implosion dynamics and behavior. We present a relatively large number (∼ 4000) of systematically perturbed 2D simulations to probe our understanding of low‐mode fuel and ablator asymmetries seeded by asymmetric illumination. We find that Gaussian process surrogate models are able to predict both the total neutron yield and the degradation in performance due to asymmetries. The surrogates are then applied to simulations containing new sources of degradation to quantify the impact of the new source.