A kinetic study of fusion burn waves in compressed deuterium–tritium and proton–boron plasmas

We present particle-in-cell simulations with Monte Carlo collisions of fusion burn waves in compressed deuterium–tritium and proton–boron plasmas. We study the energy balance in the one-dimensional expansion of a hot-spot by simulating Coulomb collisions, fusion reactions, and bremsstrahlung emission with a Monte Carlo model and inverse bremsstrahlung absorption using a new PIC model. This allows us to self-consistently capture the alpha particle heating and radiative losses in the expanding hot-spot and surrounding cold fuel. After verifying our model in a code-to-code comparison with both kinetic and fluid codes for the case of a deuterium–tritium hot-spot, we simulate the expansion of a proton–boron hot-spot initialized at 200 keV and 1,000 g/ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="m1"><mml:msup><mml:mrow><mml:mtext>cm</mml:mtext></mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mn>3</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:math> . Our model predicts that energy radiated by the hot-spot is recaptured by the surrounding high-density opaque fuel reducing the expansion work done by the propagating burn wave. As a result, we find the net fusion energy produced over the course of $20$∼ps is twice the initial hot-spot energy independent of whether radiation physics is included.