Recent progress and future directions in kinetic modeling of Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) implosions
The difficulty of rad-hydro simulations in capturing many experimental observables, including integrated metrics such as yield and bang time in many paradigmatic Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) capsule implosions has prompted the community to look into broader, higher fidelity physical models for such systems (e.g., the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation) [1]. However, these improved models are not incremental in sophistication, but disruptive, becoming higher dimensional (due to the need to describe phase space), strongly nonlinear, nonlocally coupled, and demanding entirely new numerical strategies to solving them on a computer. This numerical barrier has made their development and deployment for system-scale simulations of ICF implosions and other HED experiments very challenging, with only a few such tools currently available in the community. In this presentation, I will describe our progress in developing practical, efficient, and accurate kinetic simulation tools [2] and their application to multispecies plasma shocks [3] and ICF implosions [4]. I will also discuss recently started efforts at LANL to develop a kinetic simulation capability for hohlraum environments in multiple dimensions.
- Rinderknecht et al., PPCF, 60 (6) 2018
- Taitano et al., CPC 258(2021); JCP 365(2018); JCP 318 (2016); JCP 297 (2015)
- Keenan et al., PoP 25032103 (2018); Keenan et al., PRE 96(2017)
- Keenan et al., PoP 27(2020); Taitano et al, PoP 25056310 (2018)
Bio: Luis Chacon is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Senior Scientist of International Stature (Scientist 5) in the Applied Mathematics and Plasma Physics group in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Dr. Chacon received his Master's degree in Industrial Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1994, and his Master and Ph.D. degrees in Nuclear Engineering from the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and 2000, respectively. After graduation, he joined the Theoretical Division at LANL as a Director’s funded Postdoctoral Fellow in 2000, and became a staff member in 2002. He later joined the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) from 2008-2012, and returned to LANL in 2012. Luis is currently an Associate and Executive Editor in the Journal of Computational Physics. His research spans many aspects of plasma simulation and algorithm development, including transport, magnetohydrodynamics, and kinetic modeling (both Eulerian and Lagrangian).
