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Author: Ian Andrew Bush
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Ian Andrew Bush
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Ian Bush
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Languages : en
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This thesis presents a mixture of theoretical work and experimental results relating to the generation and transport of relativistic electrons in fast ignition inertial confinement fusion. First the theoretical work is presented, which focuses on the effect that a fast electron beam has on a background plasma. The fast electron beam drives a resistive return current in the plasma, which causes Ohmic heating, leading to a pressure gradient, and a $J \times B$ force. Both of these would be expected to cause cavitation in the background plasma. In this work an analytic model has been developed which shows that the pressure gradient is the dominant force, and predicts the significance of cavitation over a range of parameters relevant to fast ignition fusion. In addition to this the timescale on which shocks can form is considered. This work was verified by the development of a one dimensional fluid code which included the effects of a resistive return current, and was used to model shock formation when the cavitation in the plasma is strong. Some results from a two dimensional version of the code are also presented. The experimental work in this thesis focuses on an experiment which looked at the interaction of a high-powered laser with gold cone targets, similar to those that would be used in cone-guided fast ignition schemes. In this experiment, the effect of defocusing the laser upon the production of hot electrons was investigated. A copper wire was attached to the cones to act as a diagnostic for the hot electrons. A ray-tracing code was developed to better understand the change in intensity inside the cone when the laser is defocused. The results of this experiment demonstrate that the energy coupling of the laser into hot electrons is maintained when defocusing, while the spectrum of the hot electrons softens.
Author: Tammy Yee Wing Ma
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ISBN: 9781124013404
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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The reentrant cone approach to Fast Ignition, an advanced Inertial Confinement Fusion scheme, remains one of the most attractive because of the potential to efficiently collect and guide the laser light into the cone tip and direct energetic electrons into the high density core of the fuel. However, in the presence of a preformed plasma, the laser energy is largely absorbed before it can reach the cone tip. Full scale fast ignition laser systems are envisioned to have prepulses ranging between 100 mJ to 1 J.A few of the imperative issues facing fast ignition, then, are the conversion efficiency with which the laser light is converted to hot electrons, the subsequent transport characteristics of those electrons, and requirements for maximum allowable prepulse this may put on the laser system. This dissertation examines the laser-to-fast electron conversion efficiency scaling with prepulse for cone-guided fast ignition. Work in developing an extreme ultraviolet imager diagnostic for the temperature measurements of electron-heated targets, as well as the validation of the use of a thin wire for simultaneous determination of electron number density and electron temperature will be discussed.
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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The reentrant cone approach to Fast Ignition, an advanced Inertial Confinement Fusion scheme, remains one of the most attractive because of the potential to efficiently collect and guide the laser light into the cone tip and direct energetic electrons into the high density core of the fuel. However, in the presence of a preformed plasma, the laser energy is largely absorbed before it can reach the cone tip. Full scale fast ignition laser systems are envisioned to have prepulses ranging between 100 mJ to 1 J.A few of the imperative issues facing fast ignition, then, are the conversion efficiency with which the laser light is converted to hot electrons, the subsequent transport characteristics of those electrons, and requirements for maximum allowable prepulse this may put on the laser system. This dissertation examines the laser-to-fast electron conversion efficiency scaling with prepulse for cone-guided fast ignition. Work in developing an extreme ultraviolet imager diagnostic for the temperature measurements of electron-heated targets, as well as the validation of the use of a thin wire for simultaneous determination of electron number density and electron temperature will be discussed.
Author: Jun Li
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 101
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This thesis studies several problems related to hot (energetic) electron generation in laser-plasma interactions in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We study laserplasma instabilities (LPI) that can generate hot electrons in direct drive ICF under a range of laser intensities relevant to both the conventional hot-spot ignition and shock ignition. We study the in uence of LPI and hot electrons on the hydrodynamic evolution of ICF targets. We study hot electron generation in intense laser-plasma interactions in fast ignition cone targets. We also study how to implement particle collisions, which are important to hot electron generation in LPI, in Particle-in-Cell (PIC) codes on Graphic Process Units (GPU's). We find that ion density modulations can turn convective two-plasmon decay (TPD) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) instabilities to absolute ones in the region below the quarter critical density (nc=4). In this region, our uid simulations show that when a sinusoidal density modulation is superimposed on a linear density profile, convective two-plasmon decay (TPD) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) instabilities can become absolutely unstable under realistic direct-drive ICF conditions. Analysis of a three-wave model with a two-slope density profile shows that a sufficiently large change of the density gradient in a linear density profile can turn convective instabilities into absolute ones. An analytical expression is given for the threshold of the gradient change, which depends on the convective gain only. Growth rates for the absolute modes are also obtained. The threshold and growth rates from the two-slope profile are found to approximate those under sinusoidal modulations. These results explain the origin of the TPD modes below the nc=4 surface that in previous research were found to be critical to hot electron generation. Combining PIC and hydrodynamics simulations, we study the LPI and hydro evolution of coronal plasmas in an OMEGA EP[J.H. Kelly et al., 2006] long-scalelength experiment[Hu et al., 2013; Haberberger et al., 2014] with planar targets. Plasma and laser conditions are first obtained in a DRACO hydro simulation with only inverse-bremsstrahlung absorption. Using these conditions, an OSIRIS PIC simulation is performed to study laser absorption and hot-electron generation caused by LPI near the nc=4 region. The obtained information from the PIC simulation is subsequently coupled back to another DRACO simulation to examine how the LPI affect the overall hydrodynamics. The results show that the LPIinduced laser absorption can increase the electron temperature due to local heating by plasma waves. But it does not significantly change the density scale length in the corona because the high heat conductivity can spread the higher energy deposited near the nc=4 region in a wider region, and the portion of the energy carried by the hot electrons going towards high density region is still deposited beyond the nc=4 region. The collisional effects can affect the hot electron generation by damping the coupling waves of TPD and SRS instabilities. We have benchmarked the collision package in OSIRIS and adapted this package to a PIC code on graphics processors (GPU) with CUDA. The collision package is based on the cumulative collision theory, which treats a succession of small-angle binary collisions as a unique binary collision with a large scattering angle. It uses the computing cell in the GPUPIC code as the collision cell, and randomly pairs the particles in each collision cell for collision. In this process, it takes advantage of the fast on-chip shared memory and gets a remarkable performance. The benchmarks show that this collision package only needs to be called every 100 steps, and has a performance of 0:07 - 0:09ns=particle - step, only a 1:4% increase over the 5:36ns=particle - step without collisions on a Nvidia GTX 680 GPU. Test problems of beam-plasma scattering and electron plasma wave damping show that the collision frequencies calculated from the simulation results are consistent with theory. Hot electron generation is also important in fast ignition where typical laser intensities are higher than the hot-spot ignition or shock ignition. We perform PIC simulations for a cone-in-shell integrated fast-ignition experiment at the Omega Laser Facility[Boehly et al., 1997] with the initial plasma density profile taken from hydrodynamic simulations of the prepulse interaction with the gold cone. Hotelectron generation from laser-pre-plasma interactions and transport up to 100nc are studied. The simulations show a mean divergence half-angle of 68 degrees and 50% absorption for the hot electrons. The results show that the hot electrons are dominated in number by low-energy electrons but in energy by multi-MeV electrons. Electron transport between 5 and 100 nc is ballistic. In the late stage of the simulation, hot electron generation is largely independent of polarization, indicating a stochastic hot-electron-generation mechanism.
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Languages : en
Pages : 7
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We have conducted experiments on both the Vulcan and Titan laser facilities to study hot electron generation and transport in the context of fast ignition. Cu wires attached to Al cones were used to investigate the effect on coupling efficiency of plasma surround and the pre-formed plasma inside the cone. We found that with thin cones 15% of laser energy is coupled to the 40?m diameter wire emulating a 40?m fast ignition spot. Thick cone walls, simulating plasma in fast ignition, reduce coupling by x4. An increase of prepulse level inside the cone by a factor of 50 reduces coupling by a factor of 3.
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Languages : en
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The Fast Ignition (FI) approach to Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) holds particular promise for fusion energy because the independently generated compression and ignition pulses allow ignition with less compression, resulting in (potentially) higher gain. Exploiting this concept effectively requires an understanding of the transport of electrons in prototypical geometries and at relevant densities and temperatures. Our consortium, which included General Atomics (GA), The Ohio State University (OSU), the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), University of California, Davis (UC-Davis), and Princeton University under this grant (~$850K/yr) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) under a companion grant, won awards in 2000, renewed in 2005, to investigate the physics of electron injection and transport relevant to the FI concept, which is crucial to understand electron transport in integral FI targets. In the last two years we have also been preparing diagnostics and starting to extend the work to electron transport into hot targets. A complementary effort, the Advanced Concept Exploration (ACE) program for Fast Ignition, was funded starting in 2006 to integrate this understanding into ignition schemes specifically suitable for the initial fast ignition attempts on OMEGA and National Ignition Facility (NIF), and during that time these two programs have been managed as a coordinated effort. This result of our 7+ years of effort has been substantial. Utilizing collaborations to access the most capable laser facilities around the world, we have developed an understanding that was summarized in a Fusion Science & Technology 2006, Special Issue on Fast Ignition. The author lists in the 20 articles in that issue are dominated by our group (we are first authors in four of them). Our group has published, or submitted 67 articles, including 1 in Nature, 2 Nature Physics, 10 Physical Review Letters, 8 Review of Scientific Instruments, and has been invited to give numerous talks at national and international conferences (including APS-DPP, IAEA, FIW). The advent of PW capabilities - at Rutherford Appleton Lab (UK) and then at Titan (LLNL) (2005 and 2006, respectively), was a major step toward experiments in ultra-high intensity high-energy FI relevant regime. The next step comes with the activation of OMEGA EP at LLE, followed shortly by NIF-ARC at LLNL. These capabilities allow production of hot dense material for electron transport studies. In this transitional period, considerable effort has been spent in developing the necessary tools and experiments for electron transport in hot and dense plasmas. In addition, substantial new data on electron generation and transport in metallic targets has been produced and analyzed. Progress in FI detailed in §2 is related to the Concept Exploration Program (CEP) objectives; this section is a summary of the publications and presentations listed in §5. This work has benefited from the synergy with work on related Department of Energy (DOE) grants, the Fusion Science Center and the Fast Ignition Advanced Concept Exploration grant, and from our interactions with overseas colleagues, primarily at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, and the Institute for Laser Engineering in Japan.
Author: Mianzhen Mo
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ISBN:
Category : Electrons
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Ultra-intense (> 10^18 W/cm^2) laser interaction with matter is capable of producing relativistic electrons which have a variety of applications in scientific and medical research. Knowledge of various aspects of these hot electrons is important in harnessing them for various applications. Of particular interest for this thesis is the investigation of hot electrons generated in the areas of Laser Wakefield Acceleration (LWFA) and Fast Ignition (FI). LWFA is a physical process in which electrons are accelerated by the strong longitudinal electrostatic fields that are formed inside the plasma cavities or wakes produced by the propagation of an ultra-intense laser pulse through an under-dense plasma. The accelerating E-fields inside the cavities are 1000 times higher than those of conventional particle accelerators and can accelerate electrons to the relativistic regime in a very short distance, on the order of a few millimeters. In addition, Betatron X-ray radiation can be produced from LWFA as a result of the transverse oscillations of the relativistic electrons inside the laser wakefield driven cavity. The pulse duration of Betatron radiation can be as short as a few femtoseconds, making it an ideal probe for measuring physical phenomena taking place on the time scale of femtoseconds. Experimental research on the electron acceleration of the LWFA has been conducted in this thesis and has led to the generation of mono-energetic electron bunches with peak energies ranging from a few hundreds of MeV to 1 GeV. In addition, the Betatron radiation emitted from LWFA was successfully characterized based on a technique of reflection off a grazing incidence mirror. Furthermore, we have developed a Betatron X-ray probe beamline based on the technique of K-shell absorption spectroscopy to directly measure the temporal evolution of the ionization states of warm dense aluminum. With this, we have achieved for the first time direct measurements of the ionization states of warm dense aluminum using Betatron X-ray radiation probing. Fast Ignition (FI) is an advanced scheme for inertial confinement fusion (ICF), in which the fuel ignition process is decoupled from its compression. Comparing with the conventional central hot-spot scheme for ICF, FI has the advantages of lower ignition threshold and higher gain. The success of FI relies on efficient energy coupling from the heating laser pulse to the hot electrons and subsequent transport of their energy to the compressed fuel. As a secondary part of this thesis, the transport of hot electrons in overdense plasma relevant to FI was studied. In particular, the effect of resistive layers within the target on the hot electron divergence and absorption was investigated. Experimental measurements were carried out and compared to simulations indicating minimal effect on the beam divergence but some attenuation through higher atomic number intermediate layers was observed.
Author: Joshua Joseph May
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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The continued development of the chirped pulse amplification technique has allowed for the development of lasers with powers of in excess of $10^{15}W$, for pulse lengths with durations of between .01 and 10 picoseconds, and which can be focused to energy densities greater than 100 giga-atmospheres. When such lasers are focused onto material targets, the possibility of creating particle beams with energy fluxes of comparable parameters arises. Such interactions have a number of theorized applications. For instance, in the Fast Ignition concept for Inertial Confinement Fusion \cite{Tabak:1994vx}, a high-intensity laser efficiently transfers its energy into an electron beam with an appropriate spectra which is then transported into a compressed target and initiate a fusion reaction. Another possible use is the so called Radiation Pressure Acceleration mechanism, in which a high-intensity, circularly polarized laser is used to create a mono-energetic ion beam which could then be used for medical imaging and treatment, among other applications. For this latter application, it is important that the laser energy is transferred to the ions and not to the electrons. However the physics of such high energy-density laser-matter interactions is highly kinetic and non-linear, and presently not fully understood. In this dissertation, we use the Particle-in-Cell code OSIRIS \cite{Fonseca:2002, Hemker:1999} to explore the generation and transport of relativistic particle beams created by high intensity lasers focused onto solid density matter at normal incidence. To explore the generation of relativistic electrons by such interactions, we use primarily one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D), and a few three-dimensional simulations (3D). We initially examine the idealized case of normal incidence of relatively short, plane-wave lasers on flat, sharp interfaces. We find that in 1D the results are highly dependent on the initial temperature of the plasma, with significant absorption into relativistic electrons only possible when the temperature is high in the direction parallel to the electric field of the laser. In multi-dimensions, absorption into relativistic electrons arises independent of the initial temperature for both fixed and mobile ions, although the absorption is higher for mobile ions. In most cases however, absorption remains at $10's$ of percent, and as such a standing wave structure from the incoming and reflected wave is setup in front of the plasma surface. The peak momentum of the accelerated electrons is found to be $2 a_0 m_e c$, where $a_0 \equiv e A_0/m_e c^2$ is the normalized vector potential of the laser in vacuum, $e$ is the electron charge, $m_e$ is the electron mass, and $c$ is the speed of light. We consider cases for which $a_0>1$. We therefore call this the $2 a_0$ acceleration process. Using particle tracking, we identify the detailed physics behind the $2 a_0$ process and find it is related to the standing wave structure of the fields. We observe that the particles which gain energy do so by interacting with the laser electric field within a quarter wavelength of the surface where it is at an anti-node (it is a node at the surface). We find that only particles with high initial momentum -- in particular high transverse momentum -- are able to navigate through the laser magnetic field as its magnitude decreases in time each half laser cycle (it is an anti-node at the surface) to penetrate a quarter wavelength into the vacuum where the laser electric field is large. For a circularly polarized laser the magnetic field amplitude never decreases at the surface, instead its direction simply rotates. This prevents electrons from leaving the plasma and they therefore cannot gain energy from the electric field. For pulses with longer durations ($\gtrsim 250fs$), or for plasmas which do not have initially sharp interfaces, we discover that in addition to the $2 a_0$ acceleration at the surface, relativistic particles are also generated in an underdense region in front of the target. These particles have energies without a sharp upper bound. Although accelerating these particles removes energy from the incoming laser, and although the surface of the plasma does not stay perfectly flat and so the standing wave structure becomes modified, we find in most cases, the $2 a_0$ acceleration mechanism occurs similarly at the surface and that it still dominates the overall absorption of the laser. To explore the generation of relativistic electrons at a solid surface and transport of the heat flux of these electrons in cold or warm dense matter, we compare OSIRIS simulations with results from an experiment performed on the OMEGA laser system at the University of Rochester. In that experiment, a thin layer of gold placed on a slab of plastic is illuminated by an intense laser. A greater than order-of-magnitude decrease in the fluence of hot electrons is observed when those electrons are transported through a plasma created from a shock-heated plastic foam, as compared to transport through cold matter (unshocked plastic foam) at somewhat higher density. Our simulations indicate two reasons for the experimental result, both related to the magnetic field. The primary effect is the generation of a collimating B-field around the electron beam in the cold plastic foam, caused by the resistivity of the plastic. We use a Monte Carlo collision algorithm implemented in OSIRIS to model the experiment. The incoming relativistic electrons generate a return current. This generates a resistive electric field which then generates a magnetic field from Faraday's law. This magnetic field collimates the forward moving relativistic electrons. The collisionality of both the plastic and the gold are likely to be greater in the experiment than the 2D simulations where we used a lower density for the gold (to make the simulations possible) which heats up more. In addition, the use of 2D simulations also causes the plastic to heat up more than expected. We compensated for this by increasing the collisionality of the plasma in the simulations and this led to better agreement. The second effect is the growth of a strong, reflecting B-field at the edge of the plastic region in the shock heated material, created by the convective transport of this field back towards the beam source due to the neutralizing return current. Both effects appear to be caused primarily by the difference is density in the two cases. Owing to its higher heat capacity, the higher density material does not heat up as much from the heat flux coming from the gold, which leads to a larger resistivity. Lastly, we explored a numerical effect which has particular relevance to these simulations, due to their high energy and plasma densities. This effect is caused by the use of macro particles (which represent many real particles) which have the correct charge to mass ratio but higher charge. Therefore, any physics of a single charge that scales as $q^2/m$ will be artificially high. Physics that involves scales smaller than the macro-particle size can be mitigated through the use of finite size particles. However, for relativistic particles the spatial scale that matters is the skin depth and the cell sizes and particle sizes are both smaller than this. This allows the wakes created by these particles to be artificially high which causes them to slow down much faster than a single electron. We studied this macro-particle stopping power theoretically and in OSIRIS simulations. We also proposed a solution in which particles are split in to smaller particles as they gain energy. We call this effect Macro Particle Stopping. Although this effect can be mitigated by using more particles, this is not always computationally efficient. We show how it can also be mitigated by using high-order particle shapes, and/or by using a particle-splitting method which reduces the charge of only the most energetic electrons.
Author: Jonathan Lee Peebles
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Relativistic laser plasma interactions in conjunction with an underdense pre-plasma have been shown to generate a two temperature component electron spectrum. The lower temperature component described by "ponderomotive scaling" is relatively well known and understood and is useful for applications such as the fast ignition inertial confinement fusion scheme. The higher energy electrons generated due to pre-plasma are denoted as "super-ponderomotive" electrons and facilitate interesting and useful applications. These include but are not limited to table top particle acceleration and generating high energy protons, x-rays and neutrons from secondary interactions. This dissertation describes experimental and particle-in-cell computational studies of the electron spectra produced from interactions between short pulse high intensity lasers and controlled pre-plasma conditions. Experiments were conducted at 3 laser labs: Texas Petawatt (University of Texas at Austin), Titan (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and OMEGA-EP (University of Rochester). These lasers have different capabilities, and multiple experiments were carried out in order to fully understand super-ponderomotive electron generation and transport in the high intensity laser regime (I > 10^18 W/cm^2). In these experiments, an additional secondary long pulse beam was used to generate different scale lengths of "injected" pre-plasma while the pulse length and intensity of the short pulse beam were varied. The temperature and quantity of super-ponderomotive electrons were monitored with magnetic spectrometers and inferred via bremsstrahlung spectrometers while trajectory was estimated via Cu-K[alpha] imaging. The experimental and simulation data show that super-ponderomotive electrons require pulse lengths of at least 450 fs to be accelerated and that higher intensity interactions generate large magnetic fields which cause severe deflection of the super-ponderomotive electrons. Laser incidence angle is shown to be extremely important in determining hot electron trajectory. Longer pulse length data taken on OMEGA-EP and Titan showed that super-ponderomotive electrons could be created without the need for an initial pre-plasma due to the underdense plasma created during the high intensity interaction alone.
