Modeling the Transport of Intense Relativistic Electron Beams through Nitrogen Gas

Intense, relativistic electron beam transport through a gaseous medium has important applications in the fields of material response, gas discharges, electron beam propagation, and radiography. Recent efforts at NRL have extended our nitrogen gas chemistry model that is valid for current densities exceeding 1 kA/cm
²
at gas pressures on the order of 1 Torr [1]. The model tracks 42 species of atomic, molecular, and ionized nitrogen as a function of time. This extended nitrogen chemistry model has been implemented in the hybrid particle-in-cell / fluid code LSP and initial twodimensional simulations show better agreement with beam transport experiments than previous nitrogen chemistry models.