Key issues of heavy ion beam (HIB) inertial confinement fusion (ICF) include an efficient stable beam transport, beam focusing, uniform fuel pellet implosion, and so on. To realize a HIB fine focus on a fuel pellet, space-charge neutralization of incident focusing HIB is required at the HIB final transport just after a final focusing element in an HIB accelerator. In this article, an insulator annular tube guide is proposed at the final transport part, through which a HIB is transported. The physical mechanism of HIB charge neutralization based on an insulator annular guide is as follows: A local electric field created by HIB induces local discharges, and plasma is produced on the insulator inner surface. Then electrons are extracted from the plasma by the HIB net space charge. The electrons emitted neutralize the HIB space charge well.

Beams for heavy ion fusion are likely to require at least partial neutralization in the reactor chamber. Present target designs call for higher beam currents and smaller focal spots than most earlier designs, leading to high space-charge fields. Focusing is complicated by beam stripping in the low-pressure background gas expected in chambers. One method proposed for neutralization is passing an ion beam through a plasma before the beam enters the chamber. In this article, the electromagnetic particle-in-cell code LSP is used to study the effectiveness of this form of preneutralization for a range of plasma and beam parameters. For target chamber pressures below a few milliTorr of flibe gas, preneutralization is found to significantly reduce the beam emittance growth and spot size in the chamber.