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American Institute of Physics, Physics of Plasmas, 1(21), p. 012701

DOI: 10.1063/1.4861389

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Effects of non-local electron transport in one-dimensional and two-dimensional simulations of shock-ignited inertial confinement fusion targets

Journal article published in 2014 by Alberto Marocchino, Stefano Atzeni ORCID, Angelo Schiavi
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Abstract

In some regions of a laser driven inertial fusion target, the electron mean-free path can become comparable to or even longer than the electron temperature gradient scale-length. This can be particularly important in shock-ignited (SI) targets, where the laser-spike heated corona reaches temperatures of several keV. In this case, thermal conduction cannot be described by a simple local conductivity model and a Fick's law. Fluid codes usually employ flux-limited conduction models, which preserve causality, but lose important features of the thermal flow. A more accurate thermal flow modeling requires convolution-like non-local operators. In order to improve the simulation of SI targets, the non-local electron transport operator proposed by Schurtz-Nicolai-Busquet [G. P. Schurtz el al., Phys. Plasmas 7, 4238 (2000)1 has been implemented in the DUED fluid code. Both one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) simulations of SI targets have been performed. 1D simulations of the ablation phase highlight that while the shock profile and timing might be mocked up with a flux-limiter; the electron temperature profiles exhibit a relatively different behavior with no major effects on the final gain. The spike, instead, can only roughly be reproduced with a fixed flux-limiter value. 1D target gain is however unaffected, provided some minor tuning of laser pulses. 2D simulations show that the use of a non-local thermal conduction model does not affect the robustness to mispositioning of targets driven by quasi-uniform laser irradiation. 2D simulations performed with only two final polar intense spikes yield encouraging results and support further studies. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.