Developing acceleration schedules for NDCX-II*

Abstract

The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion Science is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions near the Bragg-peak energy. Present plans call for using about thirty induction cells to accelerate 30 nC of Li + ions to more than 3 MeV, followed by neutralized drift-compression. To heat targets to useful temperatures, the beam must be compressed to a millimeter-scale radius and a duration of about 1 ns. An interactive 1-D particle-in-cell simulation with an electrostatic field solver, acceleration-gap fringe fields, and a library of realizable analytic waveforms has been used for developing NDCX-II acceleration schedules. Axisymmetric simulations with WARP have validated this 1-D model and have been used both to design transverse focusing and to compensate for injection non-uniformities and radial variation of the fields. Highlights of this work are presented here.