Abstract :
Two major laser fusion facilities- the US National Ignition Facility, operating since 2009, and the Laser Megajoule (LMJ) now beginning operation in France, and two more megajoule-class lasers planned in China and in Russia, provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the self-heating of fusion plasmas by alpha particles (ignition) in the relative near term.

Interest in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets with applied axial magnetic fields has rekindled since Omega (LLE, Rochester, NY) direct drive implosions of spherical plastic capsules filled with deuterium gas and pre-magnetized to 8 T showed higher ion temperatures and neutron yields (Chang, et.al., PRL 107, 035006, 2011).

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Well developed 2D and 2D radiation hydrodynamic simulation codes have been used in the US, France, China and Russia to interpret ICF implosion data, but to fully understand the potential benefits of applied magnetic fields for future planned experiments with high magnetic fields, there is a need to develop numerically more robust versions of such codes that include the full set of magnetized plasma transport (MHD) equations [S. Braginskii, "Transport processes in a plasma" Reviews of Plasma Physics 1, (1965)] that can numerically manage parameters (density, temperature and field) over a wide dynamic range for implosions that converge a factor of 30 in radius.