Neutron Time-of-Flight Measurements of Charged-Particle Energy Loss in Inertial Confinement Fusion Plasmas

Neutron spectra from secondary H3(d,n)α reactions produced by an implosion of a deuterium-gas capsule at the National Ignition Facility have been measured with order-of-magnitude improvements in statistics and resolution over past experiments. These new data and their sensitivity to the energy loss of fast tritons emitted from thermal H2(d,p)H3 reactions enable the first statistically significant investigation of charged-particle stopping via the emitted neutron spectrum. Radiation-hydrodynamic simulations, constrained to match a number of observables from the implosion, were used to predict the neutron spectra while employing two different energy loss models. This analysis represents the first test of stopping models under inertial confinement fusion conditions, covering plasma temperatures of kBT≈1-4 keV and particle densities of n≈(12-2)×1024 cm-3. Under these conditions, we find significant deviations of our data from a theory employing classical collisions whereas the theory including quantum diffraction agrees with our data.