Laser Plasma Interactions And Hot Electron Generation In Inertial Confinement Fusion PDF Download

This thesis studies several problems related to hot (energetic) electron generation in laser-plasma interactions in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We study laserplasma instabilities (LPI) that can generate hot electrons in direct drive ICF under a range of laser intensities relevant to both the conventional hot-spot ignition and shock ignition. We study the in uence of LPI and hot electrons on the hydrodynamic evolution of ICF targets. We study hot electron generation in intense laser-plasma interactions in fast ignition cone targets. We also study how to implement particle collisions, which are important to hot electron generation in LPI, in Particle-in-Cell (PIC) codes on Graphic Process Units (GPU's). We find that ion density modulations can turn convective two-plasmon decay (TPD) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) instabilities to absolute ones in the region below the quarter critical density (nc=4). In this region, our uid simulations show that when a sinusoidal density modulation is superimposed on a linear density profile, convective two-plasmon decay (TPD) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) instabilities can become absolutely unstable under realistic direct-drive ICF conditions. Analysis of a three-wave model with a two-slope density profile shows that a sufficiently large change of the density gradient in a linear density profile can turn convective instabilities into absolute ones. An analytical expression is given for the threshold of the gradient change, which depends on the convective gain only. Growth rates for the absolute modes are also obtained. The threshold and growth rates from the two-slope profile are found to approximate those under sinusoidal modulations. These results explain the origin of the TPD modes below the nc=4 surface that in previous research were found to be critical to hot electron generation. Combining PIC and hydrodynamics simulations, we study the LPI and hydro evolution of coronal plasmas in an OMEGA EP[J.H. Kelly et al., 2006] long-scalelength experiment[Hu et al., 2013; Haberberger et al., 2014] with planar targets. Plasma and laser conditions are first obtained in a DRACO hydro simulation with only inverse-bremsstrahlung absorption. Using these conditions, an OSIRIS PIC simulation is performed to study laser absorption and hot-electron generation caused by LPI near the nc=4 region. The obtained information from the PIC simulation is subsequently coupled back to another DRACO simulation to examine how the LPI affect the overall hydrodynamics. The results show that the LPIinduced laser absorption can increase the electron temperature due to local heating by plasma waves. But it does not significantly change the density scale length in the corona because the high heat conductivity can spread the higher energy deposited near the nc=4 region in a wider region, and the portion of the energy carried by the hot electrons going towards high density region is still deposited beyond the nc=4 region. The collisional effects can affect the hot electron generation by damping the coupling waves of TPD and SRS instabilities. We have benchmarked the collision package in OSIRIS and adapted this package to a PIC code on graphics processors (GPU) with CUDA. The collision package is based on the cumulative collision theory, which treats a succession of small-angle binary collisions as a unique binary collision with a large scattering angle. It uses the computing cell in the GPUPIC code as the collision cell, and randomly pairs the particles in each collision cell for collision. In this process, it takes advantage of the fast on-chip shared memory and gets a remarkable performance. The benchmarks show that this collision package only needs to be called every 100 steps, and has a performance of 0:07 - 0:09ns=particle - step, only a 1:4% increase over the 5:36ns=particle - step without collisions on a Nvidia GTX 680 GPU. Test problems of beam-plasma scattering and electron plasma wave damping show that the collision frequencies calculated from the simulation results are consistent with theory. Hot electron generation is also important in fast ignition where typical laser intensities are higher than the hot-spot ignition or shock ignition. We perform PIC simulations for a cone-in-shell integrated fast-ignition experiment at the Omega Laser Facility[Boehly et al., 1997] with the initial plasma density profile taken from hydrodynamic simulations of the prepulse interaction with the gold cone. Hotelectron generation from laser-pre-plasma interactions and transport up to 100nc are studied. The simulations show a mean divergence half-angle of 68 degrees and 50% absorption for the hot electrons. The results show that the hot electrons are dominated in number by low-energy electrons but in energy by multi-MeV electrons. Electron transport between 5 and 100 nc is ballistic. In the late stage of the simulation, hot electron generation is largely independent of polarization, indicating a stochastic hot-electron-generation mechanism.