Abstract
The application of laser pulses with psec or shorter duration enables nonthermal efficient ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks with homogeneous high ion energies exceeding ion current densities of $10^{12}~\text{A}~\text{cm}^{-2}$ . The effects of ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks with high energy proton beams are proposed for muon production in a compact magnetic fusion device. The proposed new scheme consists of an ignition fusion spark by muon catalyzed fusion ( $\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}$ CF) in a small mirror-like configuration where low temperature D–T plasma is trapped for a duration of $1~\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}\text{s}$ . This initial fusion spark produces sufficient alpha heating in order to initiate the fusion process in the main device. The use of a multi-fluid global particle and energy balance code allows us to follow the temporal evolution of the reaction rate of the fusion process in the device. Recent progress on the ICAN and IZEST projects for high efficient high power and high repetition rate laser systems allows development of the proposed device for clean energy production. With the proposed approaches, experiments on fusion nuclear reactions and $\unicode[STIX]{x03BC}$ CF process can be performed in magnetized plasmas in existing kJ $/$ PW laser facilities as the GEKKO-LFEX, the PETAL and the ORION or in the near future laser facilities as the ELI-NP Romanian pillar.
Highlights
The advent of laser pulses of ps or shorter duration and of very high power opened a basically new physics topic which includes relativistic effects[1, 2]
The alpha avalanche process[57] enhances the alpha heating effect in the case of p11B fusion reaction with interest for future investigations on compact magnetic fusion devices working with the attractive aneutronic fusion fuel. These results promote the development of new high power laser systems and their coupling with compact magnetic fusion devices for clean energy production
In view of the basically new aspects of generation of ultrahigh space charge neutral relativistic ion densities[4, 7, 8] based on the ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks[3, 5, 6], the mechanism of generation of ultrahigh density beams of protons with energies above of hundreds of MeV[17, 18] opens a new access to μCF[11]
Summary
The advent of laser pulses of ps or shorter duration and of very high power opened a basically new physics topic which includes relativistic effects[1, 2]. The application of the nonthermal, efficient ultrahigh acceleration for a new approach for nuclear fusion[7] led to an alternative kind of shock ignition[8, 9] Parallel to these ultrahigh accelerations, ultrahigh ion current densities were detected[10] in the space charge neutral directed motion of the plasma blocks with homogeneous high ion energies exceeding ion current densities of 1012 A cm−2. Recent development of kJ/PW laser systems[30] in worldwide laser facilities enable to perform preliminary experiments on muon production by proton beam interaction with solid targets and investigate fusion process in magnetized plasmas with applications to astrophysics[28,29,30] or energy production[25, 26, 28,29,30]
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