Target designs for improving fusion ignition yield
Target designs for improving fusion ignition yield lead image
In 2022, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved fusion ignition for the first time. Using hundreds of focused laser beams, it created an interaction that heated up a fuel of deuterium and tritium, imparting more kinetic energy than it used.
To optimize future results and achieve ignition with less initial energy, Ceurvorst et al. used a variety of statistical models and numerical investigations to improve implosion designs at the OMEGA laser system. Different from NIF’s approach, OMEGA heats its target up directly rather than mounting it within a cylinder, bypassing one source of energy loss.
Key among the team’s improvements to the system is the addition of silicon dopants to the deuterium-tritium target, which reduces instabilities and enhances the energy coupling to the target. This — along with other improvements, like higher laser bandwidth optimization — allows researchers to explore parameter spaces that were previously inaccessible and will inform future facility designs for more efficient fusion.
“This is just a small piece of the overall puzzle,” said author Luke Ceurvorst. “By continuing to explore the parameter space in our target and pulse designs, these models become more powerful and let us efficiently find routes to greater overall performance.”
Fusion science has two major goals: nuclear stockpile stewardship and clean energy. Though seemingly disparate, both require high gain, or more energy out than in.
“With NIF achieving ignition in 2022, we know that our performance metrics are correct and that the goal of high gain is achievable,” said Ceurvorst. “It is now a question of how to most efficiently and robustly get there.”
Source: “Progress towards hydro-equivalent ignition in OMEGA direct-drive DT-layered implosions,” by Luke Ceurvorst, Riccardo Betti, Varchas Gopalaswamy, Aarne Lees, James P. Knauer, Michael Jonathan Rosenberg, Dhrumir P Patel, Rahman Ejaz, Connor Alexander Williams, Ka Ming Woo, Pericles S Farmakis, Duc Minh Cao, Cliff Avery Thomas, Igor V. Igumenshchev, Kenneth S. Anderson, Timothy J. B. Collins, Reuben Epstein, Andrey A. Solodov, Chad James Forrest, Christian Stoeckl, Rahul Shah, Vladimir Yu. Glebov, Hannah McClow, Valeri N. Goncharov, Russell K Follett, David Turnbull, Kristen Churnetski, Dustin Froula, Sean Patrick Regan, Roger Janezic, Chad Fella, Michael Koch, Walter T. Shmayda, Mark Bonino, David Harding, Sid Sampat, Katelynn A. Bauer, Samuel Morse, Maria Gatu Johnson, Christopher Wink, Richard Petrasso, Chikang Li, Johan A Frenje, Claudia Meneses Shuldberg, Joshua Murray, David S. Guzman, Bernardo Serrato, and Michael Farrell, Physics of Plasmas (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0238716 .
This paper is part of the Papers from the 65th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics Collection, learn more here .
