Particle beam interactions with plasmas and their application to inertial fusion

Present day target designs indicate that particle beams with 1-10 MJ and 100-500 TW, focused to intensities around 100 TW/cm2 will be required to ignite targets with gains of 10-100. Due to uncertainties about the symmetry and stability of the implosion, these requirements may change by as much as an order of magnitude as more is learned. The particle beams will interact with target plasmas which have temperatures of several hundred electron volts and densities up to solid density. Under these conditions the main energy-loss mechanism is collisional, however, in the case of electrons, the orbits can be substantially altered by electric and magnetic fields. Experiments with thin foils have measured energy deposition enhancement by a factor of 5-10 with foils mounted in the anode, and by a factor of 20 or more with foils mounted on a stalk extending into the diode