A kinetic study of burn propagation in pre-assembled inertial confinement fusion targets including advanced mixed-fuel configurations

While the National Ignition Facility has recently achieved many major milestones in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) including the demonstration of ignition and target gain greater than unity, there are still many challenges that must be addressed when considering a future inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plant. Most notably IFE requires target gain in excess of ~100 which will depend upon a thermonuclear burn wave propagating from the igniting region into the surrounding fuel. In this study, we present a numerical model capable of simulating the kinetic and radiative physics in burning plasmas and the spherical propagation of a burn front. After demonstrating the model correctly shows sensitivity to ignition near theoretical predictions for the case of isochoric deuterium–tritium, we simulate pre-assembled configurations with the aneutronic fuel proton–boron-11 (p¹¹B). Initial findings are that the conditions needed to achieve high gain in pure p¹¹B will be challenging to achieve with present-day drivers; therefore, alternative mixed-fuel cycles capable of achieving high gain while still leveraging aneutronic fuel are considered.