Elliptical Magnetic Mirror generated via Resistivity Gradients for Fast Ignition ICF

TL;DR

This paper studies an elliptical magnetic mirror scheme for guiding fast electrons in Fast Ignition ICF, demonstrating significant efficiency improvements at larger scales relevant to practical applications.

Contribution

It extends the elliptical magnetic mirror concept to multi-kJ scale conditions, showing its effectiveness and scalability for enhancing Fast Ignition performance.

Findings

Coupling efficiency increases by a factor of 3-4.

The scheme remains beneficial at larger, more realistic scales.

Significant improvement over previous smaller-scale studies.

Abstract

The elliptical magnetic mirror scheme for guiding fast electrons for Fast Ignition proposed by Schmitz (H.Schmitz et al., {\it Plasma Phys.Control.Fusion},{\bf 54} 085016 (2012)) is studied for conditions on the multi-kJ scale which are much closer to full-scale Fast Ignition. When scaled up, the elliptical mirror scheme is still highly beneficial to Fast Ignition. An increase in the coupling effiency by a factor of 3--4 is found over a wide range of fast electron divergence half-angles.