A completely rigorous first-principles calculation of the charged particlestopping power has recently been performed by Brown, Preston, and Singleton(BPS). This calculation is exact to leading and next-to-leading order in theplasma number density, including an exact treatment of two-body quantumscattering. The BPS calculation is therefore extremely accurate in the plasmaregime realized during the ignition and burn of an inertial confinement fusioncapsule. For deuterium-tritium fusion, the 3.5 MeV alpha particle range tendsto be 20-30% longer than most models in the literature have predicted, and theenergy deposition into the ions tends to be smaller. Preliminary numericalsimulations indicate that this increases the rho-R required to achieveignition.
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