The energy loss and penetration of multi-megelectronvolt protons into a uniform deuterium-tritium (DT) plasma has been calculated. The effects of nuclear elastic scattering and Coulomb interactions are treated from a unified point of view. In general, multiple scattering enhances the proton linear-energy transfer along the initial proton direction, thus the energy deposition increases near the end of its range. The net effect of multiple scattering is to reduce the penetration from 1.20 to 1.02 $\text{g}{\text{cm}}^{-2}$ for 12 MeV protons in a $\rho =500$ $\text{g}{\text{cm}}^{-3}$ plasma at $T=5$ keV. These results should have relevance to proton fast ignition, specifically to energy deposition calculations that critically assess quantitative ignition requirements.

• Received 11 July 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.016405