Collisional Effects on Hot-Electron Generation in Two-Plasmon-Decay Instability in Inertial Confinement Fusion

Recent particle-in-cell (PIC) and fluid simulations for the study of the collisional effects on hot-electron generation in two-plasmon-decay (TPD) instability in the regime relevant to experiments on the OMEGA Laser System are presented. The collision package in the PIC code \textit{OSIRIS} has been benchmarked and shown to produce proper electron--ion collision rates in PIC simulations. Collisions have been found to significantly reduce TPD hot-electron generation. This reduction is partially caused by collisional suppression of the nonlinear TPD modes away from the quarter-critical surface that were found to form the first stage of hot-electron acceleration.\footnote{R. Yan \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{108}, 175002 (2012).} This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Cooperative Agreement Nos. DE-FG02-06ER54879 and DE-FC52-08NA28302, by NSF PHY-0903797, and by NSFC 11129503.