Escape of \alpha-particle in inertial confinement fusion

TL;DR

This paper develops a modified model to accurately estimate alpha-particle escape in inertial confinement fusion, considering various physical effects, and provides a practical formula applicable across a wide temperature and density range.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive modified model for alpha-particle escape that improves upon traditional models by including relativistic effects and detailed collision dynamics.

Findings

Escape effect is stronger in the modified model than in traditional models.

A fitted expression for escape factor achieves ±0.02 accuracy for 1-150 keV temperatures.

The escape factor significantly impacts hot-spot dynamics and energy gain calculations.

Abstract

Escape of $\alpha$-particles from a burning or an ignited burning deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel with temperature up to more than tens keV is very important in inertial confinement fusion, which can significantly influence not only the hot spot dynamics and the energy gain but also the shielding design in fusion devices. In this paper, we study the $\alpha $-particle escape from a burning or an ignited burning DT fuel by considering the modifications including the $\alpha $-particle stopping by both DT ions and electrons with their Maxwellian average stopping weights, the relativity effect on electron distribution, and the modified Coulomb logarithm of the DT-$\alpha $ particle collisions. As a result of our studies, the escape-effect from our modified model is obviously stronger than those from the traditional models. A fitted expression is presented to calculate the escape factor in a DT fuel, which can be applied to a burning fuel with temperatures of 1 to 150 keV and areal densities of 0.04 to 3 g/cm$^2$ with an accuracy within $\pm0.02$. Finally, we discuss the $\alpha $-particle escape-effect on the hot-spot dynamics and the thermonuclear energy gain by comparing the results with escape factors from different models.