Review on Recent Developments in Laser Driven Inertial Fusion

Discovery of the laser in 1960 hopes were based on using its very high energy concentration within very short pulses of time and very small volumes for energy generation from nuclear fusion as “Inertial Fusion Energy” (IFE), parallel to the efforts to produce energy from “Magnetic Confinement Fusion” (MCF), by burning deuterium-tritium (DT) in high temperature plasmas to helium. Over the years the fusion gain was increased by a number of magnitudes and has reached nearly break-even after numerous difficulties in physics and technology had been solved. After briefly summarizing laser driven IFE, we report how the recently developed lasers with pulses of petawatt power and picosecond duration may open new alternatives for IFE with the goal to possibly ignite solid or low compressed DT fuel thereby creating a simplified reactor scheme. Ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks after irradiation of picosecond (PS) laser pulses of around terawatt (TW) power in the range of 1020 cm/s2 was discovered by Sauerbrey (1996) as measured by Doppler effect where the laser intensity was up to about 1018 W/cm2. This is several orders of magnitude higher than acceleration by irradiation based on thermal interaction of lasers has produced.