We review the various compression mechanisms in laser fusion, including the exploding pusher compression, the ablative compression and the cannon-ball type compression. The scaling laws of the ablation pressure, the mass ablation rate and the hydrodynamic efficiency are discussed for plasma ablation driven by three differnt carriers of heat flux, namely, thermal electrons, high energy electrons and thermal radiation. The cannon-ball target is a double shell target with holes on an outer shell through which laser beams are injected. Its features are also discussed.
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