Study of Ion Stripping and Charge Exchange for Heavy Ion Fusion

To accurately model transport in the heavy ion fusion chamber, it is necessary to know the evolution of beam charge state due to ionization or recombination. At present there is no accurate or complete information for electron loss and capture from these fast, low-charge heavy ions, and the theoretical model in the simulation codes, such as LSP is not accurate enough to describe the processes, especially multi-electron ionizations. Thus, it is very important to explore better theoretical approaches to calculate cross sections of multi-electron losses especially ion stripping, charge exchange for near-term and driver scale HIF research. Based on the investigation of different approaches on the heavy ion-atom collisions, with emphasis on the features related with low-charged heavy ions, especially multi-electron processes and correlation effects, an improved classic trajectory Monte Carlo simulation model will be set up to solve the n-body ion-atom ionization problem in HIF´s interest. The calculation results will be benchmarked with the data obtained through finished experiments from the literature as well. Finally, the improved code will be implemented into LSP code as a subroutine to become an integral part of the code. In current stage, a subroutine with a database of typical ionization stripping cross sections and change exchange for low-charge-state, heavy ions mainly in the experimental energy level will be developed for LSP code to serve ongoing experiments and simulations in current heavy ion beam fusion project, which is shown in this paper. More data including for the energy in drive scale can be integrated into the subroutine in the future expecting to be used in HIF and high energy density physics as well