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Register a new userIon kinetic effects on the ignition and burn of ICF targets
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Benjamin-Edouard Peigney
Publication date
2014
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
Benjamin-Edouard Peigney
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In this Article, we study the hydrodynamics and burn of the thermonuclear fuel in inertial confinement fusion pellets at the ion kinetic level. The analysis is based on a two-velocity-scale Vlasov-Fokker-Planck kinetic model that is specially tailored to treat fusion products (suprathermal {alpha}-particles) in a self-consistent manner with the thermal bulk. The model assumes spherical symmetry in configuration space and axial symmetry in velocity space around the mean flow velocity. Compared to fluid simulations where a multi-group diffusion scheme is applied to model {alpha} transport, the full ion-kinetic approach reveals significant non-local effects on the transport of energetic $alpha$-particles. This has a direct impact on hydrodynamic spatial profiles during combustion: the hot spot reactivity is reduced, while the inner dense fuel layers are preheated by the escaping {alpha}-suprathermal particles, which are transported farther out of the hot spot. We show how the kinetic transport enhancement of fusion products leads to a significant reduction of the fusion yield.
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The first simulations employing a kinetic treatment of both fuel and shell ions to model inertial confinement fusion experiments are presented, including results showing the importance of kinetic physics processes in altering fusion burn. A pair of direct drive capsule implosions performed at the OMEGA facility with two different gas fills of deuterium, tritium, and helium-3 are analyzed. During implosion shock convergence, highly non-Maxwellian ion velocity distributions and separations in the density and temperature amongst the ion species are observed. Diffusion of fuel into the capsule shell is identified as a principal process that degrades fusion burn performance.
In this paper, we give a review of three hohlraum geometries, including cylindrical, octahedral and six-cylinder-port hohlraums, in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) mainly from theoretical side. Every hohlraum has its own strengths and weaknesses. Although there is a problem of drive asymmetry in the cylindrical hohlraums due to some non-ideal factors, the success of ignition is still possible if more laser energy is available beyond the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the future. Octahedral hohlraums can provide the high symmetry flux on capsule. However, octahedral hohlraums suffer from several problems due to the complicated three-dimensional plasma conditions inside. And up to now, there is no one target design with the octahedral hohlraums in which each problem can be solved at the same time. Six-cylinder-port hohlraums combine the merits in theory of both cylindrical and octahedral hohlraums to a certain extent. We introduce a target design with good performance by using the six-cylinder-port hohlraums, in which the key issues of concern, such as laser energy, drive symmetry, and laser plasma interaction (LPI), etc, are all balanced.
Although the interaction of a flat-foil with currently available laser intensities is now considered a routine process, during the last decade emphasis is given to targets with complex geometries aiming on increasing the ion energy. This work presents a target geometry where two symmetric side-holes and a central-hole are drilled into the foil. A study of the various side-holes and central-hole length combinations is performed with 2-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations for polyethylene targets and a laser intensity of 5.2x10^21 W cm^-2. The holed-targets show a remarkable increase of the conversion efficiency, which corresponds to a different target configuration for electrons, protons and carbon ions. Furthermore, diffraction of the laser pulse leads to a directional high energy electron beam, with a temperature of ~40 MeV or seven times higher than in the case of a flat-foil. The higher conversion efficiency consequently leads to a significant enhancement of the maximum proton energy from holed-targets.
The results from 2.5-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations for the interaction of a picosecond-long ignition laser pulse with a plasma pellet of 50-$mu m$ diameter and 40 critical density are presented. The high density pellet is surrounded by an underdense corona and is isolated by a vacuum region from the simulation box boundary. The laser pulse is shown to filament and create density channels on the laser-plasma interface. The density channels increase the laser absorption efficiency and help generate an energetic electron distribution with a large angular spread. The combined distribution of the forward-going energetic electrons and the induced return electrons is marginally unstable to the current filament instability. The ions play an important role in neutralizing the space charges induced by the the temperature disparity between different electron groups. No global coalescing of the current filaments resulted from the instability is observed, consistent with the observed large angular spread of the energetic electrons.
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