Species separation in inertial confinement fusion fuels

Abstract

It is shown by means of multi-fluid particle-in-cell simulations that convergence of the spherical shock wave that propagates through the inner gas of inertial confinement fusion-relevant experiments is accompanied by a separation of deuterium (D) and tritium (T) ions across the shock front. Deuterons run ahead of the tritons due to their lower mass and higher charge-to-mass ratio and can reach the center several tens of picoseconds before the tritons. The rising edge of the DD and TT fusion rate is also temporally separated by the same amount, which should be an observable in experiments and would be a direct proof of the “stratification conjecture” on the shock front [Amendt et al., Phys. Plasmas 18, 056308 (2011)]. Moreover, dephasing of the D and T shock components in terms of density and temperature leads to a degradation of the DT fusion yield as the converging shock first rebounds from the fuel center (shock yield). For the parameters of this study, the second peak in the fusion yield (compression yield) is strongly dependent on the choice of the flux limiter.