Physics of the implosion up until the time of ignition in a revolver (triple-shell) capsule

A revolver is designed to have two dynamical fuel implosion stages to reach ignition: a shock phase in which the fuel is pre-heated up until the shock collapses at the capsule center, followed by an adiabatic compression phase to ignition. This picture assumes ideal hydrodynamics. Employing the state-of-the-art, hybrid (kinetic-ion/fluid electron), multi-ion Vlasov-Fokker-Planck code, iFP, along with semi-analytic predictions from ideal hydrodynamics in spherical geometry, we confirm this two phase picture—resolving some outstanding questions in Revolver design along the way. Although we find that shock kinetic effects and non-ideality are present in the course of the implosion, these effects do not change the overall dynamics (which is well described by ideal hydrodynamics theory). Additionally, we put the assumption of adiabaticity, for the post-collapse phase, to the test. Finally, we verify the ideal hydro-conjecture that the shock collapse (fuel) convergence is ∼ 2.12 given a single shock, and we confirm that the convergence is about 2.5 in the case of two shocks—in agreement with previous radiation-hydrodynamics simulations.