Effect of soft and hard x-rays on shock propagation, preheating and ablation characteristics in pure and doped Be ablators

TL;DR

This study uses radiation hydrodynamic simulations to analyze how soft and hard x-rays affect shock propagation, preheating, and ablation in pure and doped beryllium ablators for inertial confinement fusion, revealing doping benefits.

Contribution

It introduces new scaling relations for shock and ablation characteristics and demonstrates the advantages of Cu doping in reducing preheat effects while maintaining ablation performance.

Findings

Hard x-rays increase preheat and shock temperatures.

Cu doping reduces preheating and improves ablator performance.

Shock velocities slightly decrease with doping but increase with hard x-ray fraction.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the performance of pure and doped Be ablators used for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) pellets in terms of shock velocity, shock breakout temperature, preheat temperature and mass ablation rate through radiation hydrodynamic (RHD) simulations. For this study, we apply a constant radiation profile (drive temperatures varying from 120 - 200 eV) consisting of a low frequency Planck spectrum (soft x-rays) and a high frequency Gaussian spectrum (hard x-rays, commonly termed as "M-band") on a planar foil of the ablator. The fraction of energy density in the hard x-ray spectrum ($\alpha$) has been varied from 0 to 0.25. The predominant effect of hard x-rays is to preheat the ablator ahead of the shock front. Steady rise in preheat temperature and shock breakout temperature is observed on increasing the fraction of hard x-rays. Preheating can be mitigated by doping Be with a mid-Z element Cu as its opacity is much higher in the high frequency region. On doping Be with 1\% Cu, the shock velocities decrease slightly compared to pure Be. However, higher shock velocities are observed on increasing the fraction of M-band. We observe significant decrease in shock breakout and maximum preheat temperature in doped Be foil. Steady rise in these temperatures is observed on increasing $\alpha$. We have proposed new scaling relations for shock velocity, shock breakout temperature, maximum preheat temperature and mass ablation rate with the radiation temperature and the fraction of M-band energy density in both pure and doped Be ablators. In terms of ablator performance, Cu doped Be ablator is found to be superior to pure Be. Though doping significantly reduces preheating, the mass ablation rates are nearly unaffected.