Theory for assessing yield amplification and ignition proximity in the presence of hotspot mixing

It’s well known that the presence of high-Z mixing in a DT plasma increases Bremsstrahlung x-ray losses. The presence of mix, thus, increases the “ignition temperature” for the plasma. Therefore, mix has both an explicit and implicit impact on the inference of yield amplification and the ignition boundary. The explicit impact is a change to the thermodynamic variables such as plasma temperature and pressure as compared to what those variables would have been without mix. The implicit impact is that for a given thermodynamic state, the inferred yield amplification and ignition boundary for “clean” DT no longer applies. In this talk, we discuss how an existing theoretical framework [1] can be used to calculate a correction to yield amplification and the ignition boundary in the presence of mix.



[1] Hurricane, et al., Phys. Plasmas, 28, 022704 (2021)