RAPCAL code: A flexible package to compute radiative properties for optically thin and thick low and high-Z plasmas in a wide range of density and temperature

Abstract

Radiative properties are fundamental for plasma diagnostics and hydro-simulations. For this reason, there is a high interest in their determination and they are a current topic of investigation both in astrophysics and inertial fusion confinement research. In this work a flexible computation package for calculating radiative properties for low and high Z optically thin and thick plasmas, both under local thermodynamic equilibrium and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium conditions, named RAPCAL is presented. This code has been developed with the aim of providing accurate radiative properties for low and medium Z plasmas within the context of detailed level accounting approach and for heavy elements under the detailed configuration accounting approach. In order to show the capabilities of the code, there are presented calculations of some radiative properties for carbon, aluminum, krypton and xenon plasmas under local thermodynamic and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium conditions.

Time-dependent and radiation field effects on collisional-radiative simulations of radiative properties of blast waves launched in clusters of xenon

“…Once the plasma atomic level populations are obtained, the radiative properties such as the monochromatic opacities and emissivities, mean opacities, radiative power losses and the specific intensities are calculated using RAPCAL code [27,28]. For the bound-bound contributions we employed the atomic data generated using FAC code.…”

“…Finally, for the free-free contribution, the Kramers semi-classical expression for the inverse bremsstrahlung cross section was used [30]. A more detailed description of the calculation of the radiative properties can be found in [27].…”

Opacity calculation for target physics using the ABAKO/RAPCAL code

“…Radiative properties, such as emissivities, opacities and radiative power losses, have been obtained with the RAPCAL code [9,21 ] using atomic data and level population provided by the previous modules. The bound-bound spectrum includes all the allowed transitions in the dipole approximation along with all the detailed atomic levéis considered.…”

“…In particular, the understanding of ICF plasmas requires emissivities and opacities for both hydro-simulations and diagnostics [2], During the last two decades, carbón and aluminum plasmas have been of particular interest for experimental and theoretical work [3][4][5][6], Most of this work was developed under LTE conditions, and since the calculation of plasma radiative properties is very complex, this is a welcome simplification. However, to assist in the calculation of such properties beyond the LTE assumption, the code ABAKO/RAPCAL has been developed [7][8][9], which can determine populations, radiative properties, spectrally resolve opacities and emissivities, and perform K-shell spectroscopic diagnostics to infer both the average electrón density and the temperature of the plasma in LTE and non-LTE (NLTE) regimes.…”

Parametrization of the average ionization and radiative cooling rates of carbon plasmas in a wide range of density and temperature

“…We perform an analysis of the influence of the thermodynamic regime in these quantities and we also present a parametrization of the cooling rate obtained by fitting bi-dimensional polynomial expressions (depending on the electron density and temperature) to our calculations which is valid in a wide range of electron temperatures (1-1000 eV) and electron densities (10 10 -10 21 cm" 3 ) covering CE, LTE and NLTE regimes. All the calculations presented in this work were made using ABAKO/RAPCAL computational package [34][35][36] which is briefly described in the next section. In Section 3 the analysis of the monochromatic emissivity, the radiative power loss and the cooling rate is made and the parametrization of the average ionization and the cooling rate is also presented.…”