Recent inertial confinement fusion experiments at NIF reaching 1.35 MJ and the Lawson criterion for ignition - Livestream

The inertial fusion community have been working towards ignition for decades, since the idea of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) was first proposed by Nuckolls, et al., in 1972.  On August 8, 2021, the Lawson criterion for ignition was finally demonstrated in the laboratory on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Northern California.  The experiment, N210808, produced a fusion yield of 1.35 MJ from 1.9 MJ of laser energy and appears to have crossed the tipping-point of thermodynamic instability according to several ignition metrics.  The “indirect” ICF approach at NIF described in this talk uses a hohlraum radiation cavity to heat and ablate the outside of a capsule that contains Deuterium-Tritium (DT) fusion fuel.  This ablation causes the fuel to accelerate inward (implode) at high velocities doing work on a central lower density “hot spot” of DT fuel, increasing the temperature and density of the hot spot to the extreme conditions required for fusion.  This presentation discusses the development of a platform that increased the hot-spot energy and hot-spot pressure, to achieve record ICF performance.

Speaker: Annie Kritcher, Lawrence Livermore National Lab

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