Solenoid transport of a heavy ion beam for warm dense matterstudies and inertial confinement fusion

From February to July 2006, I have been doing research as a guest at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), in the Heavy Ion Fusion group. This internship, which counts as one semester in my master's program in France, I was very pleased to do it in a field that I consider has the beauty of fundamental physics, and at the same time the special appeal of a quest for a long-term and environmentally-respectful energy source. During my stay at LBNL, I have been involved in three projects, all of them related to Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment (NDCX). The first one, experimental and analytical, has consisted in measuring the effects of the eddy currents induced by the pulsed magnets in the conducting plates of the source and diagnostic chambers of the Solenoid Transport Experiment (STX, which is a subset of NDCX). We have modeled the effect and run finite-element simulations that have reproduced the perturbation to the field. Then, we have modified WARP, the Particle-In-Cell code used to model the whole experiment, in order to import realistic fields including the eddy current effects and some details of each magnet. The second project has been to take part in a campaign of WARP simulations of the same experiment to understand the leakage of electrons that was observed in the experiment as a consequence to some diagnostics and the failure of the electrostatic electron trap. The simulations have shown qualitative agreement with the measured phenomena, but are still in progress. The third project, rather theoretical, has been related to the upcoming target experiment of a thin aluminum foil heated by a beam to the 1-eV range. At the beginning I helped by analyzing simulations of the hydrodynamic expansion and cooling of the heated material. But, progressively, my work turned into making estimates for the nature of the liquid/vapor two-phase flow. In particular, I have been working on criteria and models to predict the formation of droplets, their size, and their partial or total evaporation in the expanding flow