Charged Particle Stopping Power Effects on Ignition: Some Results from an Exact Calculation

Abstract

A completely rigorous first-principles calculation of the charged particle stopping power has recently been performed by Brown, Preston, and Singleton (BPS). This calculation is exact to leading and next-to-leading order in the plasma number density, including an exact treatment of two-body quantum scattering. The BPS calculation is therefore extremely accurate in the plasma regime realized during the ignition and burn of an inertial confinement fusion capsule. For deuterium-tritium fusion, the 3.5 MeV alpha particle range tends to be 20-30% longer than most models in the literature have predicted, and the energy deposition into the ions tends to be smaller. Preliminary numerical simulations indicate that this increases the rho-R required to achieve ignition.

19 pages, 3 Figures, Published in the proceedings for the 49th Annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, Orlando FL, 12-16 November 2007. Added more details about numerics

References in corpus (3)

• Temperature Equilibration Rate with Fermi-Dirac Statistics
• BPS Explained I: Temperature Relaxation in a Plasma
• BPS Explained II: Calculating the Equilibration Rate in the Extreme Quantum Limit

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Quantum computation of stopping power for inertial fusion target design
• Burn regimes in the hydrodynamic scaling of perturbed inertial confinement fusion hotspots
• Mixed Stochastic-Deterministic Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory: Application to Stopping Power of Warm Dense Carbon
• Alpha-particle generation from H-11B fusion initiated by laser-accelerated boron ions
• The energy partitioning of non-thermal particles in a plasma: or the Coulomb logarithm revisited