J. Davanzo et al., CHARGE DEPENDENCE OF NONLINEAR STOPPING POWER, Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 415(3), 1998, pp. 632-636
In heavy ion fusion the interaction process between heavy ions and mat
ter under extreme conditions (i.e. high ion charge states, solid state
densities and temperatures of hundreds of eV) is a topic of great imp
ortance for the target design. The consequent strong ion-target coupli
ng cannot be fully described by the standard stopping power theories,
as the dielectric and the binary collision approaches. We study the in
teraction of heavy ions with a classical plasma in regimes of strong n
onlinear coupling by means of Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations. In t
his paper we focus on the charge dependence of the nonlinear stopping
power. Our results are in good agreement with Vlasov simulations. We s
how that when the ion-plasma interaction process becomes nonlinear, th
e standard theories overestimate the energy loss. Nonlinear screening
seems to explain in a simple manner our results. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sci
ence B.V. All rights reserved.