Progress Toward A Validated Quasilinear Model for Characterizing Properties of Current-Carrying Magnetized Plasmas in Pulsed Power Systems

Pulsed power inertial confinement fusion experiments rely on magnetically insulated transmission lines (MITLs) to deliver mega-amps of current to a load. These power feeds are designed to prevent high-voltage arcs and feature orthogonal electric and magnetic fields. Despite magnetic insulation, plasmas produced at electrode surfaces in MITLs undergo as yet unexplained cross-field transport, which leads to parasitic currents and unpredictable power flow. The low-beta plasmas are essentially collisionless and their properties are dictated by kinetic physics. To understand how microscopic physics in the MITL affects macroscopic plasma properties like resistivity and heating, a self-consistent closed-form quasilinear theoretical analysis is developed for the lower-hybrid drift instability in a two-species current-carrying magnetized plasma. The theoretical predictions, which account for electron and ion gyromotion, are shown to be consistent with multiple aspects of nonlinear noise-free fourth-order finite-volume Vlasov simulations. The theoretical and computational study demonstrates progress toward a validated description of the nonlinear saturated state of current-carrying plasmas and toward predicting "anomalous" properties. LLNL-ABS-830659