Non-LTE radiation transport in high radiation plasmas

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.