Effect of nuclear charge on laser-induced fusion enhancement in advanced fusion fuels

Abstract

Based on the preliminary work done in a previous paper [Phys. Rev. C 105, 054001 (2022)], we investigate the effects of laser-induced fusion rate enhancements of different fusion fuels. In the aforementioned work, which considered $_{1}^{2}\mathrm{H}\text{\ensuremath{-}}_{1}^{3}\mathrm{H}$ (D-T) and ${\mathrm{DHe}}^{3}$ fusion, it was observed that a larger product of charge numbers of the fusion reactants leads to an increased laser-induced enhancement to the fusion cross section for static external electric fields. We investigate whether this trend persists for DT, ${\mathrm{DHe}}^{3}$, and ${p\mathrm{B}}^{11}$ fusion for dynamical electric fields, using the semiclassical approaches of the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin method and the imaginary-time method, as well as the Kramers-Henneberger method, and the Volkoff-state approximation. We find that the fusion cross section of ${p\mathrm{B}}^{11}$ indeed exhibits the largest relative enhancement for all laser parameters considered and may even surpass the cross section of DT and ${\mathrm{DHe}}^{3}$ fusion.