Beam ICF — mass instead of light
Capsule implosions driven by intense particle beams — heavy- or light-ion beams from accelerator chains, and pulsed relativistic electron beams from high-current diodes — where the driver-side physics is accelerator transport, final focusing and beam–target energy deposition. SCPN-ICF-BEAM-CORE owns the device truth of the ion_beam_icf and pulsed_electron_beam_icf configurations.
What the configuration is
Replace the laser with an accelerator: a heavy-ion beam of a few gigaelectronvolts per ion stops in a few hundredths of a gram per square centimetre of matter, so it can heat a converter or an ablator directly with an efficiency and repetition rate a laser struggles to match. The capsule physics is the same hot-spot ignition as the laser family; what changes is the driver — the illumination geometry of many beams on two sides, the elliptical focal spots and their fluence, the range–energy behaviour of the ions, and a coupling chain from driver energy through conversion and coupling efficiencies to the capsule.
What the core owns
- the device boundary: plant and experiment truth, shot lifecycle and configuration policy for beam-driven capsule implosions;
- beam-campaign semantics at device level: accelerator-chain and diode declarations, final-focus and pointing contracts, deposition-profile declarations, target metrology contracts;
- the declared configuration: beam species, beam energy, pulse duration and particle energy; pellet radius;
- diagnostic semantics, reference frames and clock identity declarations; the CONTROL adapter specification; the registry binding (version 1.0.0) and the domain manifest.
What it explicitly excludes
- Laser-driven ICF, all three coupling paths: SCPN-ICF-LASER-CORE; projectile and impact ICF: SCPN-ICF-IMPACT-CORE; non-imploding beam-target fusion (fixed-target and colliding-beam systems without implosion): SCPN-BEAM-TARGET-CORE.
- Solver mathematics and validation evidence (radiation hydrodynamics, radiation transport, burn physics): SCPN-Fusion-Core, until an exact surface passes the reactor family migration gate; no solver code exists in, or was copied into, the device core.
- Typed signal semantics and comparability: SCPN-Phase-Orchestrator (review-only output, never actuation). Control admission and action formation: SCPN-Control. Machine protection: independent systems retain the final veto. Portfolio presentation and gating: SCPN-Studio.
Level-0 physics and its anchor
The illumination geometry of a multibeam arrangement (elliptical spot, area, effective radius, equal split across both cones, spot-averaged fluence); the mass inventory of a three-layer capsule with the DT specific energy built from the two nuclear masses; the factorisation \(G_{\mathrm{target}} = \eta_c\eta_eG_{\mathrm{capsule}}\) in both directions and the enclosure area a capsule-to-enclosure ratio implies; a composed record that builds the ablator thickness from the pellet radius and the declared fuel radius and refuses a fuel layer that reaches the surface. The cited driver-window review (Bangerter, Faltens & Seidl 2013) is behind a subscription and not on file; two DOE laboratory preprints are, both for heavy-ion drivers, and nothing here is evidence about the electron-beam configuration. Anchored on Ho, Harte & Tabak, UCRL-JC-118161 (1994) — the capsule's three radii and three densities and every mass that follows (25.45 mg ablator, 3.87 mg fuel, 0.0073 mg vapour), the capsule gain exactly 430 — and Callahan-Miller & Tabak, UCRL-JC-131974 (1998) — both printed focal spots at the precision each printed answer carries, the beam counts doubling into the printed totals. Implied, and labelled implied: the burnup 0.3286 and the conversion efficiency 0.8859, which the sources plot or leave to be required by their other numbers. Reconstructed and named for it: the driver energy of the capsule design (yield over system gain, a round trip). Measured: neither layer thickness returns exactly (the printed radii are decimals in millimetres); the illumination review truncates its gains rather than rounding them; no single power law joins the three printed range–energy pairs; the two families' enclosure ratios are different quantities and neither checks the other.
Load the Ho capsule and the Callahan spots in the explorer →
Non-claims
- The pulse duration used by the fixtures is declared and no source is claimed for it.
- The beams are split equally and the fluence is averaged over the whole ellipse; the sources' beams are Gaussian, so no value here is a peak.
- An implied burn-up fraction or conversion efficiency above one is returned rather than refused, because it is the finding that the declarations do not describe one design.
- No value describes, approximates or validates any real machine or shot; driver-species, accelerator-architecture and fuel choices are configuration facets, not separate claims.
Capabilities and evidence
Evidence maturity computational_prototype, five implemented capabilities, each with its evidence record in VALIDATION.md: the device configuration model, the diagnostic and clock semantics model, level-0 device physics (the closed forms on this page), the device 3D model and the device CAD model. No parameter set or channel describes any real machine or diagnostic.