Related papers: Will NIF Work
While the underlying physics of the ICF approach to nuclear fusion is well understood and a technological implementation of the indirect drive variant of the ICF paradigm has recently been given at NIF commercially viable ICF concepts for…
We consider the prototypical deuterium-tritium fusion reaction. At intermediate initial kinetic energies (in the keV regime), a major bottle-neck of this reaction is the Coulomb barrier between the nuclei, which is overcome by tunneling.…
This report contains two parts: (1) A list of "points" highlighting the strategic-political and military-technical reasons and implications of the very probable siting of ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in Japan,…
A recent neutron analysis of experiments conducted at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has revealed deviations from the Maxwellian distributions in the ion relative kinetic energy of burning plasmas, with the surprising emergence of…
In inertial confinement fusion the target implosion non-uniformity is introduced by a driver beams' illumination non-uniformity, a fuel target alignment error in a fusion reactor, the target fabrication defect, et al. For a steady operation…
Comparing with ITER, the experimental fusion machine under constraction, the next step test fusion power plant, DEMO will be characterized by very long pulse/steady-state operation and much higher plasma volume and fusion power. The…
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will contain the world's most powerful laser. NIF requires more than 1500 precisely timed trigger pulses to control the timing of laser and diagnostic equipment. The Integrated Timing System applies new…
We first show a possible mechanism to create a new type of nuclear fusion, thermal resonance fusion, i.e. low energy nuclear fusion with thermal resonance of light nuclei or atoms, such as deuterium or tritium. The fusion of two light…
The current and future need for high-energy neutrons has been a subject of increasing discussion and concern. Immediate applications for such an intense neutron source include medical isotope production, high-energy physics (HEP) research,…
Propagation of intense laser beams is crucial for inertial confinement fusion, which requires precise beam control to achieve the compression and heating necessary to ignite the fusion reaction. The National Ignition Facility (NIF), where…
The ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) set off a global wave of research on the inertial fusion energy (IFE). However, IFE requires a necessary target gain G of 30-100, while it is hard to achieve the fusions at such high gain…
We introduce a novel fusion scheme enabled by laser-plasma solitons, which promises to overcome several fundamental obstructions to reaching the breakeven condition. For concreteness, we invoke deuterium-tritium (DT) as fuels. The intense…
Dry-wall laser inertial fusion (LIF) chambers will have to withstand strong bursts of fast charged particles which will deposit tens of kJ m$^{-2}$ and implant more than 10$^{18}$ particles m$^{-2}$ in a few microseconds at a repetition…
Nuclear fusion offers the potential for being a near limitless energy source by fusing together deuterium and tritium nuclei to form helium inside a plasma burning at 100 million kelvin. However, scientific and engineering challenges…
We present analytic calculations and results from computational simulations showing that reaction-in-flight (RIF) neutrons act as a robust indicator for mixing of the ablator shell material into the fuel in DT capsules designed for the…
The fusion of deuterium (D) with tritium (T) is the most promising of the reactions that could power the thermonuclear reactors of the future. Already favored for its low activation energy and high yield, it may lead to even more efficient…
There are two main methods of nulcear fusion: inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and magnetic confinement fusion (MCF). Existing thermonuclear reactors are very complex, expensive, large, and heavy. They cannot achieve the Lawson creterion.…
Improving the description of the equation of state (EoS) of deuterium-tritium (DT) has recently been shown to change significantly the gain of an Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) target (Hu et al., PRL 104, 235003 (2010)). We use here an…
A fusion reactor requires plasma pre-heating before the rate of deuterium-tritium fusion reactions becomes significant. In ITER, radiofrequency (RF) heating of 3He ions, additionally puffed into the plasma, is one of the main options…
A new, efficient, algorithmic approach to create illumination configurations for laser driven high energy density physics experiments is proposed. The method is applied to a polar direct drive solid target experiment at the National…