• A. Friedman, J.J. Barnard, R.H. Cohen, D.P. Grote, S.M. Lund, W. M. Sharp
  LLNL, Livermore, California
• R.C. Davidson, M. Dorf, I. Kaganovich
  PPPL, Princeton, New Jersey
• A. Faltens, E. Henestroza, J.-Y. Jung, J.W. Kwan, E. P. Lee, M. Leitner, J.-L. Vay, W.L. Waldron
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

The near-term mission of the Heavy Ion Fusion Science Virtual National Laboratory (a collaboration of LBNL, LLNL, and PPPL) is to study "warm dense matter" at ~1 eV heated by ion beams; a longer-term topic is ion-driven target physics for inertial fusion energy. Beam bunch compression factors exceeding 50x have been achieved on the Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment (NDCX) at LBNL, enabling rapid target heating; however, to meet our goals an improved platform, NDCX-II, is required. Using refurbished induction cells from the decommissioned Advanced Test Accelerator at LLNL, NDCX-II will compress a ~500 ns pulse of Li+ ions to ~1 ns while accelerating it to 3-4 MeV (a spatial compression of 100-150x) over ~15 m. Non-relativistic ions exhibit complex dynamics; the beam manipulations in NDCX-II are actually enabled by strong longitudinal space charge forces. We are using analysis, an interactive 1D PIC code (ASP) with optimizing capabilities and a centroid-offset model, and both (r,z) and 3D Warp-code simulations, to develop the NDCX-II accelerator. Both Warp and LSP are used for plasma neutralization studies. This talk describes the methods used and the resulting physics design.