Filamentation of a heavy‐ion beam in a reactor vessel

A heavy‐ion beam driver for inertial confinement fusion is subject to filamentation instability over a broad range of beam and plasma background conditions. The case of a beam injected into a gas‐filled reactor vessel, where finite pulse length and propagation distance play an important role in limiting mode growth, is analyzed. The effects of transverse thermal spread, spherical convergence to the pellet, and finite magnetic decay rate of eddy currents are included in this treatment. It is concluded that a cold beam will be severly disrupted unless the product of magnetic plasma frequency and propagation time is not large compared with unity. If this condition is not met, mode growth may still be limited to about six e folds by adding transverse velocity spread such that the pulse tail is in a state of pinch equilibrium. However, this approach causes much of the pulse to be lost by thermal expansion.