Variance reduction method for particle transport equation in spherical geometry

Abstract

This article is devoted to the design of importance sampling method for the Monte Carlo simulation of a linear transport equation. This model is of great importance in the simulation of inertial confinement fusion experiments. Our method is restricted to a spherically symmetric idealized design: an outer sphere emitting radiation towards an inner sphere, which in practice should be thought of as the hohlraum and the fusion capsule, respectively. We compute the importance function as the solution of the corresponding stationary adjoint problem. Doing so, we have an important reduction of the variance (by a factor 50 to 100), with a moderate increase of computational cost (by a factor 2 to 8).