Ignition and high gain with ultrapowerful lasers*

Abstract

Ultrahigh intensity lasers can potentially be used in conjunction with conventional fusion lasers to ignite inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsules with a total energy of a few tens of kilojoules of laser light, and can possibly lead to high gain with as little as 100 kJ. A scheme is proposed with three phases. First, a capsule is imploded as in the conventional approach to inertial fusion to assemble a high-density fuel configuration. Second, a hole is bored through the capsule corona composed of ablated material, as the critical density is pushed close to the high-density core of the capsule by the ponderomotive force associated with high-intensity laser light. Finally, the fuel is ignited by suprathermal electrons, produced in the high-intensity laser–plasma interactions, which then propagate from critical density to this high-density core. This new scheme also drastically reduces the difficulty of the implosion, and thereby allows lower quality fabrication and less stringent beam quality and symmetry requirements from the implosion driver. The difficulty of the fusion scheme is transferred to the technological difficulty of producing the ultrahigh-intensity laser and of transporting this energy to the fuel.