Two-stream instability assessment of fast ignition driven by quasi-monoenergetic ions

Abstract

During the past decade, the generation of energetic ion beams by high-intensity laser-plasma interactions has attracted much interest due to their many applications in high energy density physics and fast ignition. The interaction of the energetic beam with the pre-compressed DT plasma may be accompanied by micro-instabilities along normal and parallel to the beam direction. In application of ions heavier than hydrogen isotopes in fast ignition, we expect that the number of required ions reduces considerably. Here, we present a one-dimensional relativistic beam-plasma instability formulation to investigate the stabilization mode of a flow aligned two-stream instability spectrum where both cold-fluid and kinetic linear theory results are reported. In the latter, the saddle point expansion of the relativistic drift-Maxwellian distribution was applied. The stabilization mode was then extracted by using the Nyquist method. We have also restricted our stability analyses to quasi-monoenergetic ion beams of type Li3+, C6+, Al13+, and V23+ with optimal energies of 140 MeV, 450 MeV, 2.2 GeV, and 5.5 GeV, respectively, proposed by numerical simulations in fast ignition [Honrubia et al. Laser Part. Beams 32, 419 (2014)]. The stable mode is attained by two free system parameters, i.e., beam/plasma density ratio, α, and background plasma temperature, Tp. In the case of low Zb ions, by different degree levels, both parameters push the system to complete stability. However, in the case of high Zb ions, complete stabilization is achieved just through few orders of magnitude lower α. It has also been shown that in complete stabilization of the system, the α parameter scales as an inverse square of ions' atomic number, ∝Zb−2.