Simulations of electron transport for fast ignition using LSP

A crucial issue for the viability of the fast ignition approach to inertial fusion energy is the transport of the ignition pulse energy from the critical surface to the high-density compressed fuel. Experiments have characterized this transport through the interaction of short pulse, high intensity lasers with solid-density targets containing thin Kα fluorescence layers. These experiments show a reasonably well-collimated beam, although with a significantly larger radius than the incident laser beam. We report on LSP calculations of these experiments, which show reasonable agreement with the experimental observations.