POPULATION KINETICS MODELING FOR NON-LTE AND NON-MAXWELLIAN PLASMAS GENERATED IN FINITE TEMPERATURE DENSE MATTER EXPERIMENTS ARISING FROM SHORT PULSE X-RAY SOURCE

The short pulse x-ray sources will provide a major advance in dense matter studies important to understand implosion physics for ICF as a generator of warm dense matter or a probe of finite temperature dense matter. The interaction of such a high-energy photon pulse with the initially solid matter creates highly transient states of plasmas initially whose relaxation processes are of interest to the equation of states or spectral properties of these matter. For these plasmas, assumptions such as LTE population distributions or Maxwellian electron energy distributions should be tested by employing a method that does not make these assumption a priori. Our goal is to present a model that can be used to simulate the electron distributions, the ionization balance and the spectral output of transient systems generated in the future ICF experiments. We report on the progress in developing a non-LTE atomic population kinetics code integrated with Boltzmann equation solver to provide a self-consistent time-dependent solution of the level populations and the particle energy distributions.