Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion Science is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions. Present plans call for using 34 induction cells to accelerate 45 nC of Li+ ions to more than 3 MeV, followed by neutralized drift-compression. To heat targets to the desired temperatures, the beam must be compressed to a millimeter-scale radius and a duration of about 1 ns. A novel NDCX-II acceleration schedule has been developed using an interactive one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation ASP to model the longitudinal physics and axisymmetric WARP simulations to validate the 1-D model and add transverse focusing. Three-dimensional Warp runs have been used recently to study the sensitivity to misalignments in the focusing solenoids.