Our colleague Eugene Evans of PPPL has had his paper, “Particle-in-cell studies of fast-ion slowing-down rates in cool tenuous magnetized plasma,” accepted for publication in Physics of Plasmas. The article is tentatively scheduled for the April 2018 issue. A quote from the reviewer:

The paper … is an interesting, well-written paper that uses PIC to build upon earlier direct numerical simulation methods based on molecular dynamics. The authors present a clearly written discussion of the scaling properties of slowing down theory to support their numerical studies. The authors do a very good job describing the simulation approach they take… Of particular note in the paper is the good agreement between their numerical data and the sub-thermal model even when the effective computational log(lambda) was on the order of 1…  the authors did not stop with their results but instead applied their conclusions to the FRC reactor, predicting that the neutron production rate is 100 times lower than a conventional DT Tokamak.

This paper is key to the low radiation levels claimed for our PFRC design, and hence the Direct Fusion Drive. The fast ion slowing-down is what causes the tritium and other fusion ash to exit the machine. You can view a preprint on arXiv.

We will post again once the paper is published and available from Physics of Plasmas.