Opacity calculation for target physics using the ABAKO/RAPCAL code

Abstract

Radiative properties of hot dense plasmas remain a subject of current interest since they play an important role in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research, as well as in studies on stellar physics. In particular, the understanding of ICF plasmas requires emissivities and opacities for both hydro-simulations and diagnostics. Nevertheless, the accurate calculation of these properties is still an open question and continuous efforts are being made to develop new models and numerical codes that can facilitate the evaluation of such properties. In this work the set of atomic models ABAKO/RAPCAL is presented, as well as a series of results for carbon and aluminum to show its capability for modeling the population kinetics of plasmas in both LTE and NLTE regimes. Also, the spectroscopic diagnostics of a laser-produced aluminum plasma using ABAKO/RAPCAL is discussed. Additionally, as an interesting application of these codes, fitting analytical formulas for Rosseland and Planck mean opacities for carbon plasmas are reported. These formulas are useful as input data in hydrodynamic simulation of targets where the computation task is so hard that in line computation with sophisticated opacity codes is prohibitive.