Inertial confinement fusion using hohlraum radiation generated by heavy-ion clusters

Abstract

This paper discusses the feasibility of employing heavy-ion cluster beams to generate thermal radiation that can be used to drive inertial fusion capsules. The low charge-to-mass ratio of a cluster may allow the driver beam to be focused to a very small spot size with a radius of the order of 100 μm, while the low energy per nucleon (of the order of 10 keV) may lead to a very short range of the driver particles in the converter material. This would result in high specific power deposition that may lead to a very high conversion efficiency. The problem of cluster stopping in cold matter, as well as in hot dense plasmas has been thoroughly investigated. The conversion efficiency of cluster ions using a low-density gold converter has also been calculated over a wide range of parameters including converter density, converter geometry, and specific power deposition. These calculations have been carried out using a one-dimensional hydrodynamic computer code that includes a multigroup radiation transport scheme [Ramis et al., Comput. Phys. Commun. 49, 475 (1988)]. The problem of symmetrization of this radiation field in a hohlraum with solid gold walls has also been thoroughly investigated using a three-dimensional view factor code. The characteristics of the radiation field obtained by this study are used as input to capsule implosion calculations that are done with a three-temperature radiation-hydrodynamic computer code MEDUSA-KAT [Tahir et al., J. Appl. Phys. 60, 898 (1986)]. A reactor-size capsule which contains 5 mg deuterium–tritium (DT) fuel is used in these calculations. The problem of using a fuel mixture with a substantially reduced tritium content has also been discussed.