Kinetic simulation of thermonuclear-neutron production by a 107-A deuterium Z pinch

Fully kinetic simulations have demonstrated that at sufficiently high currents, half of the neutrons produced by a deuterium Z-pinch are thermonuclear in origin. At 150-kA pinch current, O. A. Anderson et al. [Phys. Rev. 110, 1375 (1958)] clearly shows that essentially all of the neutrons produced by a deuterium pinch are not thermonuclear, but are initiated by an instability that creates beam-target neutrons. Since this paper, many subsequent authors have supported this result while others have claimed that pinch neutrons are, on the contrary, thermonuclear. To resolve this issue, fully kinetic, collisional, and electromagnetic simulations of the complete time evolution of a deuterium pinch have been performed. The simulations were performed with the implicit particle-in-cell code LSP, as described in D. R. Welch et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 255002 (2009)]. At 106 -A pinch currents, most of the neutrons are, indeed, beam-target in origin. At 15-MA current, half of the neutrons are thermonuclear and half...

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