A Multi-Species Reactive-Boltzmann Formulation for Self-Consistent Kinetic Simulation of Burning Fusion Plasmas

Abstract

Discrepancies between experimental data and radiation-hydrodynamic models of burning plasmas at the National Ignition Facility have been attributed, in part, to possible deviations of reactant ion distributions from Maxwellian equilibrium. In particular, it has been hypothesized that the collisional relaxation of energetic fusion products with the bulk plasma may generate suprathermal ion populations not captured by reduced models. To assess this hypothesis in a fully kinetic setting, we present a multi-species reactive--elastic kinetic framework, in which fusion sources and sinks are evaluated directly from the reactant velocity distribution function with a reactive Boltzmann collision operator. For computational efficiency, elastic interactions are modeled in the small-angle collision limit using the Landau and Lenard--Bernstein collision operators, although the framework admits large-angle elastic scattering generalizations. The integro-differential collision operators are discretized with a fast Fourier spectral method, enabling efficient, high-order accuracy evaluation of reactive processes in three-dimensional velocity space and providing a deterministic alternative to Monte Carlo collision methods. Numerical experiments are performed for spatially homogeneous two- and three-species D--D fusion systems in weakly coupled, early-time regimes. We find that fusion product heating does not generate a significant suprathermal population in the reactant ions: deviation from the corresponding Maxwellian distribution remains small in both the Frobenius norm and the fusion reactivity.