Effects of non-equilibrium particle distributions in deuterium-tritium burning

Abstract

We investigate the effects of non-equilibrium particle distributions resulting from rapid deuterium-tritium burning in plasmas using a Fokker-Planck code that incorporates small-angle Coulomb scattering, Brehmsstrahlung, Compton scattering, and thermal-nuclear burning. We find that in inertial confinement fusion environments, deviations away from Maxwellian distributions for either deuterium or tritium ions are small and result in 1% changes in the energy production rates. The deuterium and tritium effective temperatures are not equal, but differ by only about 2.5% near the time of peak burn rate. Simulations with high Z (Xe) dopants show that the dopant temperature closely tracks that of the fuel. On the other hand, fusion product ion distributions are highly non-Maxwellian, and careful treatments of energy-exchange between these ions and other particles is important for determining burn rates