Reaction analysis of neutron emission from D and DT plasmas with/without He-3

The effects of nuclear elastic scattering (knock-on) from energetic light ions on the neutron emission spectrum in fusion plasmas are studied. The knock-on spectral features in D and DT plasmas without and with radio frequency heating on a He-3 minority component are determined through Monte Carlo simulations. The neutron production magnitudes are determined relative to those due to fuel ions in the thermal bulk state (down to the level of 10(-5)), and the interference of higher order terms in the outlying spectral regions where these dominate is evaluated. The study completes the mapping of nuclear reaction and elastic scattering effects on the neutron emission spectrum including first-, second-and third-order processes. Included are the cross-couplings between dd and dt fusion reactions as manifested in the full neutron spectrum (E-n = 0-20 MeV) for DT plasmas of varying isotopic composition. This study determines the relationship between components of the neutron emission spectra and those of the underlying ion velocity distributions, which provides a general basis for judging the plasma diagnostic information that can potentially be extracted from measurement and analysis of such neutron data.