Computational Scaling Laws for Fusion Yield in Reactor Relevant Plasma Liner Magneto-Inertial Fusion

The Plasma Liner eXperiment (PLX) recently demonstrated formation of an imploding plasma liner via the merging of 36 discrete jets. Magnetized targets have been routinely formed by head-on collision of two deuterium jets magnetized by the interaction with fields from external solenoids. These jets are formed by coaxial pulsed plasma accelerators. Our three-dimensional simulation tool SPFMax has been validated against these experimental data, providing confidence to perform integrated simulations including plasma liner formation, magnetized target formation, and target compression. SPFMax is used to model the effects of plasma jet initial conditions on fusion yield in a reactor relevant parameter space. The fusion parameter space is defined by the Lindl-Widner diagram. Critical parameters such as hot spot temperature, hot spot areal density and magnetic field are used to determine potential pathways to achieve self-ignition for reactor scale fusion energies.