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.

This paper presents one- and two-dimensional computer simulations of the hydrodynamic response of solid cylindrical targets made of different materials that are irradiated by intense beams of energetic ions. The beam parameters considered in this study correspond to the design parameters of the heavy ion beam that will be produced at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt heavy ion synchrotron facility (SIS) in 1999. A few calculations, however, were also done using the beam parameters that are currently available at the SIS. Different values for specific energy deposition including 1, 10, 50, and 100 kJ/g, respectively, have been considered, whereas a number of different pulse lengths, namely, 10, 50, 100, and 200 ns, have been assumed. Various target materials, for example, solid lead, solid neon, and solid hydrogen, have been used. It is expected that this simulation study will be very helpful in the design of efficient targets for the future experiments at the GSI. These experiments will hopefully provide very useful information about many important basic physics phenomena, such as enhanced energy loss of heavy ions in hot dense plasmas, equation-of state (EOS) of matter under extreme conditions, material opacity and shock wave propagation. Another very interesting experiment with important practical implications that could be done at this facility may be the creation of metallic hydrogen by imploding appropriately designed multilayered targets containing a layer of frozen hydrogen. This paper presents the design of such a target, together with implosion simulations of this target using a hydrodynamic simulation model. These simulations show that it may be possible to compress the frozen hydrogen to achieve the theoretically predicted physical conditions necessary for hydrogen metallization (a density of the order of 1 to 2 g/cm3, a temperature of a few 0.1 eV and a pressure of about 2–5 megabar). In some cases, compression of frozen deuterium was also studied.

The symmetrization of radiation inside an indirectly driven axially symmetric target with two converters and an ellipsoidal casing is studied with the model of Murakami and Meyer-ter-Vehn, but with more realistic assumptions for the geometry. It is shown that with a useful value for the radius of the cylindrical converters, which transform beam energy into thermal radiation, it becomes much more difficult to achieve the required symmetrization, and this was not possible by varying the converter positions and radii.

The paper presents a study of symmetrization of thermal radiation in a hohlraum. This study is based on two-dimensional numerical simulations carried out using the radiation hydrodynamic code SITARA. Because of the two-dimensional nature of this model, only those hohlraum designs are treated that possess axial symmetry and contain two converters. It has also been assumed that there is no material in the space between the hohlraum components, so that scattering of radiation in the hohlraum can be excluded. The calculations show that when the hydrodynamic motion is included (dynamic model), the symmetrization problem becomes much worse compared with the nonhydrodynamic case (static model). It is more difficult to achieve the required level of symmetrization (1-2% deviation) using only two converters

No abstract