Relativistic fluid dynamics and the theory of relativistic detonation fronts are used to estimate the space-time dynamics of the burning of the D-T fuel in Laser driven pellet fusion experiments. The initial "High foot" heating of the fuel makes the compressed target transparent to radiation, and then a rapid ignition pulse can penetrate and heat up the whole target to supercritical temperatures in a short time, so that most of the interior of the target ignites almost simultaneously and instabilities will have no time to develop. In these relativistic, radiation dominated processes both the interior, time-like burning front and the surrounding space-like part of the front will be stable against Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. To achieve this rapid, volume ignition the pulse heating up the target to supercritical temperature should provide the required energy in less than ~ 10 ps.
Two-dimensional Particle-In-Cell simulations are used to explore collisionless shock acceleration in the corona plasma surrounding the compressed core of an inertial confinement fusion pellet. We show that an intense laser pulse interacting with the long scale-length plasma corona is able to launch a collisionless shock around the critical density. The nonlinear wave travels up-ramp through the plasma reflecting and accelerating the background ions. Our results suggest that protons with characteristics suitable for ion fast ignition may be achieved in this way.
Self-heating condition and following ignition in an Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) fuel pellet is evaluated by calculating the power equations, dynamically. In fact, the self-heating condition is a criterion that determines the minimum parameters of a fuel (such as temperature, density and areal density) that can be ignited. Deuterium is the main component of ICF fuels as large amounts of it are naturally available. In addition, the use of deuterium as a fuel in ICF causes the production of tritium and helium-3. However, pure deuterium has a high ignition temperature (T$\geq$40 keV) which m…
One of the best methods in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is the concept of central spark ignition, consisting of two distinct regions named as hot and cold regions and formed by hydro-dynamical implosion of fuel micro-sphere central spark ignition method in inertial fusion and fuel pellet design condition in fusion power plant has been investigated and fuel gain for isochoric model in this method is calculated. We have shown the effects of different physical parameters of inertial fusion on fuel gain and optimized limit for fuel density and fuel pellet radius has been calculated.
Inertical Confinement Fusion configuration model is analized for direct ignition without an ablator. The compression of the target pellet is neglected and rapid volume ignition is achieved by a laser pulse, which is as short as the penetraton time of the light across the pellet. The reflectivity of the target is assumed to be negligible, and the absorptivity is constant so that the light pulse can reach the opposite side of the pellet. The necessary pulse length and pulse strength is calculated.
Fast ignition is an alternative concept of laser fusion in which the task of compressing the fusion pellet to supersolid densities is accomplished by the conventional high energy nanosecond glass lasers and the task of igniting the compressed pellet is given to a high intensity, moderate energy pico second source which can set the pellet ablaze (with DT fusion reactions) by creating an adequate size hot spot in it. In this letter, we present a conceptual method by which energy from carbon dioxide ($ CO_2 $) laser could be coupled to heat up ions produced in situ in the plasma, which in turn pr…
Recently achieved high intensities of short laser pulses open new prospects in their application to hole boring in inhomogeneous overdense plasmas and for ignition in precompressed DT fusion targets. A simple analytical model and numerical simulations demonstrate that pulses with intensities exceeding 1022 W/cm2 may penetrate deeply into the plasma as a result of efficient ponderomotive acceleration of ions in the forward direction. The penetration depth as big as hundreds of microns depends on the laser fluence, which has to exceed a few tens of GJ/cm2. The fast ions, accelerated at the botto…
The one-dimensional (1D) problem on bilatiral irradiation by proton beams of the plane layer of condensed DT mixture with length $2H$ and density $ρ_0 \leqslant 100ρ_s$, where $ρ_s$ is the fuel solid-state density at atmospheric pressure and temperature of 4 K, is considered. The proton kinetic energy is 1 MeV, the beam intensity is $10^{19}$ W/cm$^2$ and duration is 50 ps. A mathematical model is based on the one-fluid two-temperature hydrodynamics with a wide-range equation of state of the fuel, electron and ion heat conduction, DT fusion reaction kinetics, self-radiation of plasma and plasm…
The results from 2.5-dimensional Particle-in-Cell simulations for the interaction of a picosecond-long ignition laser pulse with a plasma pellet of 50-$μm$ diameter and 40 critical density are presented. The high density pellet is surrounded by an underdense corona and is isolated by a vacuum region from the simulation box boundary. The laser pulse is shown to filament and create density channels on the laser-plasma interface. The density channels increase the laser absorption efficiency and help generate an energetic electron distribution with a large angular spread. The combined distribution…
Inertial Confinement Fusion is a promising option to provide massive, clean, and affordable energy for mankind in the future. The present status of research and development is hindered by hydrodynamical instabilities occurring at the intense compression of the target fuel by energetic laser beams. A recent patent combines advances in two fields: detonations in relativistic fluid dynamics and radiative energy deposition by plasmonic nano-shells. The compression of the target pellet can be moderate and rapid volume ignition is achieved by a laser pulse, which is as short as the penetration time …
The Centurion-Halite experiment demonstrated the feasibility of igniting a deuterium-tritium micro-explosion with an energy of not more than a few megajoule, and the Mike test, the feasibility of a pure deuterium explosion with an energy of more than 10^6 megajoule. In both cases the ignition energy was supplied by a fission bomb explosive. While an energy of a few megajoule, to be released in the time required of less than 10^-9 sec, can be supplied by lasers and intense particle beams, this is not enough to ignite a pure deuterium explosion. Because the deuterium-tritium reaction depends on …
The recently proposed Super Marx generator pure deuterium micro-detonation ignition concept is compared to the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility (NIF) Laser DT fusion-fission hybrid concept (LiFE) [1]. In a Super Marx generator a large number of ordinary Marx generators charge up a much larger second stage ultra-high voltage Marx generator, from which for the ignition of a pure deuterium micro-explosion an intense GeV ion beam can be extracted. A typical example of the LiFE concept is a fusion gain of 30, and a fission gain of 10, making up for a total gain of 300, with about 10 ti…
Neural network predictions of plasma confinement loss in Wendelstein 7-X pellet-fueled discharges
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory（普林斯顿等离子体物理实验室）；Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics（马克斯·普朗克等离子体物理研究所）；SUNY Cortland（纽约州立大学科特兰分校）；MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center（麻省理工学院等离子体科学与聚变中心）
In this Article, we study the hydrodynamics and burn of the thermonuclear fuel in inertial confinement fusion pellets at the ion kinetic level. The analysis is based on a two-velocity-scale Vlasov-Fokker-Planck kinetic model that is specially tailored to treat fusion products (suprathermal α-particles) in a self-consistent manner with the thermal bulk. The model assumes spherical symmetry in configuration space and axial symmetry in velocity space around the mean flow velocity. Compared to fluid simulations where a multi-group diffusion scheme is applied to model α transport, the full ion-kine…
We study the violent phase of the merger of massive binary white dwarf systems. Our aim is to characterize the conditions for explosive burning to occur, and identify a possible explosion mechanism of Type Ia supernovae. The primary components of our model systems are carbon-oxygen (C/O) white dwarfs, while the secondaries are made either of C/O or of pure helium. We account for tidal effects in the initial conditions in a self-consistent way, and consider initially well-separated systems with slow inspiral rates. We study the merger evolution using an adaptive mesh refinement, reactive, Euler…
Inertial Confinement Fusion is a promising option to provide massive, clean, and affordable energy for humanity in the future. The present status of research and development is hindered by hydrodynamic instabilities occurring at the intense compression of the target fuel by energetic laser beams. A recent proposal Csernai et al. (2018) combines advances in two fields: detonations in relativistic fluid dynamics and radiative energy deposition by plasmonic nano-shells. The initial compression of the target pellet can be eliminated or decreased, not to reach instabilities. A final and more energe…
ELI ALPS, ELI-HU Non-Profit Ltd.（ELI ALPS，ELI-HU非营利有限公司）；HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics（匈牙利科学院维格纳物理研究中心）；Department of Optics and Quantum Electronics, University of Szeged（塞格德大学光学与量子电子学系）；Cyclotron Institute, Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学回旋加速器研究所）；Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, INFN（意大利国家核物理研究所南部分实验室）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen（卑尔根大学物理与技术系）；National Laser-Initiated Transmutation Laboratory, University of Szeged（塞格德大学国家激光诱导嬗变实验室）；King's College London（伦敦国王学院）；Csernai Consult Bergen（Csernai咨询（卑尔根））；Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies（法兰克福高等研究院）
The Code O-SUKI is an integrated 2-dimensional (2D) simulation program system for a fuel implosion, ignition and burning of a direct-drive nuclear-fusion pellet in heavy ion beam (HIB) inertial confinement fusion (HIF). The Code O-SUKI consists of the four programs of the HIB illumination and energy deposition program of OK3 (Comput. Phys. Commun. 181, 1332 (2010)), a Lagrangian fluid implosion program, a data conversion program, and an Euler fluid implosion, ignition and burning program. The OK3 computes the multi-HIBs irradiation onto a spherical fuel target. One HIB is divided into many bea…
Recently NAano-Plasmonic, Laser Inertial Fusion Experiments (NAPLIFE) were proposed, as an improved way to achieve laser driven fusion. The improvement is the combination of two basic research discoveries: (i) The possibility of detonations on space-time hyper-surfaces with time-like normal (i.e. simultaneous detonation in a whole volume) and (ii) to increase this volume to the whole target, by regulating the laser light absorption using nano-shells or nano-rods as antennas. These principles can be realized in an in-line, one dimensional configuration, in the simplest way with two opposing las…
Földes and Pokol in their letter "Inertial fusion without compression does not work either with or without nanoplasmonics" criticized our works \cite{CS2015,CKP2018}. Here we refute their argumentation. Our proposed improvement is the combination of two basic research discoveries: (i) The possibility of detonations on space-time hyper-surfaces with time-like normal (i.e. simultaneous detonation in a whole volume) and (ii) to increase the ignition volume to the whole target, by regulating the laser light absorption using nanoantennas. These principles can be realized in an in-line, one dimensio…
The attainment of ultrahigh electric potentials by suppressing the stepped leader breakdown of a highly charged conductor levitated in a spiraling Taylor flow opens up the possibility of order of magnitude larger driver energies for the ignition of thermonuclear reactions by inertial confinement. In reaching gigavolt potentials, intense 1016 Watt, GeV ion beams become possible. Together with their large self-magnetic field, these beams should be powerful enough to launch a thermonuclear micro-detonation into pure deuterium, compressed and ignited by such beams. In high gain laser fusion the pr…
The Code O-SUKI-N 3D is an upgraded version of the 2D Code O-SUKI (Comput. Phys. Commun. 240, 83 (2019)). Code O-SUKI-N 3D is an integrated 3-dimensional (3D) simulation program system for fuel implosion, ignition and burning of a direct-drive nuclear-fusion pellet in heavy ion beam (HIB) inertial confinement fusion (HIF).The Code O-SUKI-N 3D consists of the three programs of Lagrangian fluid implosion program, data conversion program, and Euler fluid implosion, ignition and burning program. The Code O-SUKI-N 3D can also couple with the HIB illumination and energy deposition program of OK3 (Co…
Large scale manned space flight within the solar system is still confronted with the solution of two problems: 1. A propulsion system to transport large payloads with short transit times between different planetary orbits. 2. A cost effective lifting of large payloads into earth orbit. For the solution of the first problem a deuterium fusion bomb propulsion system is proposed where a thermonuclear detonation wave is ignited in a small cylindrical assembly of deuterium with a gigavolt-multimegampere proton beam, drawn from the magnetically insulated spacecraft acting in the ultrahigh vacuum of …
A long-term energy option that is just approaching the horizon after decades of struggle, is fusion. Recent developments allow us to apply techniques from spin physics to advance its viability. The cross section for the primary fusion fuel in a tokamak reactor, D+T=>alpha+n, would be increased by a factor of 1.5 if the fuels were polarized. Simulations predict further non-linear power gains in large-scale machines such as ITER, due to increased alpha heating. These are significant enhancements that could lower the requirements needed to reach ignition and could be used to extend useful reactor…
