Description:

Title: HED Simulations of a NIF shot with ARES

Speaker: Tanim Islam, Design Physicist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Abstract:

A high-efficiency target that converts laser energy to X-rays would be helpful for planetary defense and other mechanical-plasma effects calculations. Over the past few years, my team and I have redeveloped, characterized, and begun to improve a platform for efficient X-ray radiation at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Furthermore, the relatively low laser energies (10 kJ versus 1 MJ or more for typical shots) allow us to field these experiments with much more scheduling flexibility and often more illuminating instrumentation than standard NIF experiments.

In this presentation, I discuss some preliminary modeling and design results for these high energy shots; as a physicist, this work describes a comprehensive and well-tested application of relevant radiation transport, hydrodynamics, and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) atomic-collisional-radiative processes that convert laser energy in our platform into X-ray sources for downstream applications. I begin with the principal constituent equations for HED plasma dynamics and demonstrate matches to experimental results.

I finish with an impactful improvement to the comprehensive physics code used to simulate the experiment:

-The usage of the Busquet method to efficiently approximate the very computationally and memory expensive NLTE process.
-Comparisons between the more accurate NLTE method and Busquet method for this experiment.

**Please note, this event will be held in-person and online via Zoom at the following link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98528746509

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