Kinetic effects on neutron generation in moderately collisional interpenetrating plasma flows

Abstract

High-order two-fluid plasma solver for direct numerical simulations of plasma flows with full transport phenomena

Enhancement of nuclear reactions via the kinetic Weibel instability in plasmas

“…Furthermore, our parameters can be scaled up to astrophysical conditions, such as collisionless shocks in supernovae remnants [40,44], which can bring out the elements synthesized during the evolution of stars and enrich the interstellar medium. Our results show that the kinetic WI can have heavy influences on the analysis of experiments' results [25][26][27] or element abundance in astrophysics [7,8], and deserves more attention and further research.…”

“…This may lead to large deviations between theoretical calculations and fusion diagnosis or astrophysical observations when these experimental data are applied [7,8]. Thus, research on nuclear reactions in the plasma system is of great significance, and may help to achieve controlled fusion or solve several longstanding nucleosynthesis puzzles in astrophysics: for instance, the puzzles on 26 Al and 6,7 Li abundance [7,8].…”

“…The reaction yields are thereby significantly enhanced as the reaction cross section increases exponentially with the COM energy. Such experiments are carried out at the NIF laser facility [25,26], where enhanced neutron productions up to one order of magnitude are observed for the case of CD colliding with CH plasma flows, compared to particle-incell (PIC) simulations that include Coulomb collisions, but do not include collective collisionless plasma instabilities. Similar experiments have also been carried out at the ShenGuang II laser facility, but with collision of both deuterium plasma flows, where the neutron yield in experiments is eight times lower than the theoretical calculation purely from the measured plasma density and velocity parameters [27].…”

Observation of shock-front separation in multi-ion-species collisional plasma shocks

“…A plasma shock front with multiple ion species contains additional structure compared to a single ion plasma shock. Prior experiments, simulations, and theoretical work explored multiion-species effects in the context of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), for which species separation in the fusion fuel potentially leads to neutron yield degradation [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Interspecies ion separation and velocity separation were experimentally observed [19][20][21][22][23].…”