Diagnosing suprathermal ion populations in Z-pinch plasmas using fusion neutron spectra

Abstract

The existence of suprathermal ion populations gives rise to significant broadening of and modifications to the fusion neutron spectrum. We show that when this population takes the form of a power-law at high energies, specific changes occur to the spectrum which are diagnosable. In particular, the usual Gaussian spectral shape produced by a thermal plasma is replaced by a Lorentz-like spectrum with broad wings extending far from the spectral peak. Additionally, it is found that the full width at half maximum of the spectrum depends on both the ion temperature and the power-law exponent. This causes the use of the spectral width for determination of the ion temperature to be unreliable. We show that these changes are distinguishable from other broadening mechanisms, such as temporal and motional broadening, and that detailed fitting of the spectral shape is a promising method for extracting information about the state of the ions.