A pairwise nuclear fusion algorithm for particle-in-cell simulations: Weighted particles at relativistic energies

Abstract

A pairwise nuclear fusion algorithm for particle-in-cell simulations for arbitrarily weighted macro-particles at relativistic energies is proposed. When comparing with a recent study by Higginson et al. [J. Comput. Phys. 388, 439 (2019)], our method is also fitted with the widely used Coulomb scattering algorithm by Nanbu and Yonemura [J. Comput. Phys. 145, 639 (1998)] and Sentoku and Kemp [J. Comput. Phys. 227, 6846 (2008)] and can be implemented into a particle-in-cell simulation code with marginal efforts. The algorithm is benchmarked in situations with like-particles, unlike-particles, thermonuclear plasmas, and beam–target fusion. It is shown that only 50–100 macro-particles per cell are needed for the repeatability of fusion yields around 1%.