Three-dimensional multi-physics ILES simulations of material mixing and thermalization in separated reactants inertial confinement fusion implosions
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Inertial Confinement Fusion involves the implosion of spherical targets containing deuterium and tritium to high densities and temperatures. Successful implosions produce a thermal instability in which charged alpha particles produced by deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion redeposit their energy in the DT plasma, amplifying fusion reactivities and resulting in net energy gain relative to the energy deposited by the laser [1]. Due to the small scales of imploded hot spots (<50 μm) and short burn durations (<100 ps), the design and understanding of these implosions relies heavily on numerical simulations that feature disparate scales and conditions and involve significant interaction between diverse physics. As a result, only a handful of simulation tools have been developed that are able to successfully model such implosions. We use the xRAGE [2, 3] radiation-hydrodynamics code to perform high-resolution 3D implicit large eddy simulations [4] of recent separated reactants experiments [5], where deuterium and tritium initially reside in different materials so that DT yields are sensitive to the amount of mixing between materials, on the National Ignition Facility in order to evaluate how well it is possible to model such implosions when careful attention is paid to accurately resolving initial conditions and including models for all physics that are known to be important in such implosions. Our results demonstrate generally good agreement with most experimental observables and the discrepancies provide evidence for what may be the most important missing physics. REFERENCES [1] H. Abu-Shawareb et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 129, pp. 075001, 2022. [2] M. Gittings et al., Comp. Sci. Discov., Vol. 1, pp. 015005, 2008. [3] B. Haines et al., Phys. Plasmas, Vol. 24, pp. 052701, 2017. [4] B. Haines et al., Phys. Plasmas, Vol. 30, pp. 072705, 2023. [5] B. Albright et al., Phys. Plasmas Vol. 29, pp. 022702, 2022.
