2025/10/05 by Ziang Zhu, Zhu, Ziang, Yifan Liu +25
Physics and Astronomy · Engineering · #Laser-Plasma Interactions and Diagnostics #Magnetic confinement fusion research #Laser-induced spectroscopy and plasma
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.04298
In inertial confinement fusion (ICF), Thomson scattering (TS) is a widely used diagnostic technique for probing plasma conditions. We present a first-principles numerical approach to obtaining scattered light signals of ion acoustic features with high resolution in angle and frequency space using particle-in-cell simulations under typical ICF conditions. Our method demonstrates good agreement with existing theories for thermal collective TS. In the super-thermal collective regime, the results align with theory when the driven plasma modes are well-matched in wave vectors to the probe and collecting beams. Moreover, we also find that TS signals can remain significant even under imperfect wave-vector matching-a result that contradicts the conventional expectation that the TS spectrum strictly follows the plasma density spectrum. We attribute this discrepancy to a beating wave mechanism arising from the interaction between the probe beam and driven plasma density modulations. Our work thus provides a practical framework for interpreting TS signals from driven ion modes, a common yet complex feature in ICF plasmas.