Non-LTE radiation transport in high radiation plasmas

A primary goal of numerical radiation transport is obtaining a self-consistent solution for both the radiation field and plasma properties, which requires consideration of the coupling between the radiation and the plasma. The different characteristics of this coupling for continuum and line radiation have resulted in two separate sub-disciplines of radiation transport with distinct emphases and computational techniques. LTE radiation transfer focuses on energy transport and exchange through broadband radiation, primarily affecting temperature and ionization balance. Non-LTE line transfer focuses on narrowband radiation and the response of individual level populations, primarily affecting spectral properties. Many high energy density applications, particularly those with high-Z materials, incorporate characteristics of both these regimes. Applications where the radiation fields play an important role in the energy balance and include strong line components require a non-LTE broadband treatment of energy transport and exchange.We discuss these issues and present a radiation transport treatment which combines features of both approaches by explicitly incorporating the dependence of material properties on both temperature and radiation fields. The additional terms generated by the radiation dependence do not change the character of the system of equations and can easily be added to a numerical transport implementation. A numerical example from a Z-pinch application demonstrates that this method improves both the stability and convergence of the calculations. The information needed to characterize the material response to radiation is closely related to that used by the linear response matrix (LRM) approach to near-LTE simulation, and we investigate the use of the LRM for these calculations.