Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei, usually deuterium and tritium, combine to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises due to the difference in nuclear binding energy between the atomic nuclei before and after the reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers active or main-sequence stars and other high-magnitude stars, where large amounts of energy are released.
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a fusion energy process that initiates nuclear fusion reactions by compressing and heating targets filled with fuel. The targets are small pellets, typically containing deuterium (2H) and tritium (3H).
Fusion power is a proposed form of power generation that would generate electricity by using heat from nuclear fusion reactions. In a fusion process, two lighter atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing energy. Devices designed to harness this energy are known as fusion reactors. Research into fusion reactors began in the 1940s, but as of 2023, no device has reached net power.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, United States. NIF's mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain. It achieved the first instance of scientific breakeven controlled fusion in an experiment on December 5, 2022, with an energy gain factor of 1.5. It supports nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear explosions.
Plasma diagnostics are a pool of methods, instruments, and experimental techniques used to measure properties of a plasma, such as plasma components' density, distribution function over energy (temperature), their spatial profiles and dynamics, which enable to derive plasma parameters.
Aneutronic fusion is any form of fusion power in which very little of the energy released is carried by neutrons. While the lowest-threshold nuclear fusion reactions release up to 80% of their energy in the form of neutrons, aneutronic reactions release energy in the form of charged particles, typically protons or alpha particles. Successful aneutronic fusion would greatly reduce problems associated with neutron radiation such as damaging ionizing radiation, neutron activation, reactor maintenance, and requirements for biological shielding, remote handling and safety.
Plasma acceleration is a technique for accelerating charged particles, such as electrons, positrons, and ions, using the electric field associated with electron plasma wave or other high-gradient plasma structures. The plasma acceleration structures are created either using ultra-short laser pulses or energetic particle beams that are matched to the plasma parameters. These techniques offer a way to build high performance particle accelerators of much smaller size than conventional devices. The basic concepts of plasma acceleration and its possibilities were originally conceived by Toshiki Tajima and John M. Dawson of UCLA in 1979. The initial experimental designs for a "wakefield" accelerator were conceived at UCLA by Chandrashekhar J. Joshi et al. Current experimental devices show accelerating gradients several orders of magnitude better than current particle accelerators over very short distances, and about one order of magnitude better at the one meter scale.
Gurgen Ashotovich Askaryan was a prominent Soviet - Armenian physicist, famous for his discovery of the self-focusing of light, pioneering studies of light-matter interactions, and the discovery and investigation of the interaction of high-energy particles with condensed matter.
The High Power laser Energy Research facility (HiPER), is a proposed experimental laser-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF) device undergoing preliminary design for possible construction in the European Union. As of 2019, the effort appears to be inactive.
A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams.
John David Lawson FRS was a British engineer and physicist.
Ghulam Murtaza, SI, FPAS, is a Pakistani theoretical physicist with a specialization in the physics of ionized plasmas, and is an Emeritus Professor of physics at the Government College University in Lahore. Murtaza's work is recognizable in plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion processes to provide a better understanding of energy propagated by the main-sequence star, the Sun.
George H. Miley is a professor emeritus of physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Miley is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was Senior NATO Fellow from 1994 to 1995, received the Edward Teller Medal in 1995, the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Science Award in Fusion Technology in 2003 and the Radiation Science and Technology Award in 2004. He holds several patents.
Chandrashekhar "Chan" Janardan Joshi is an Indian–American experimental plasma physicist. He is known for his pioneering work in plasma-based particle acceleration techniques for which he won the 2006 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics and the 2023 Hannes Alfvén Prize.
The Edward Teller Award is an award presented every two years by the American Nuclear Society for "pioneering research and leadership in the use of laser and ion-particle beams to produce unique high-temperature and high-density matter for scientific research and for controlled thermonuclear fusion". It was established in 1999 and is named after Edward Teller. The award carries a $2000 cash prize and an engraved silver medal.
John D. Lindl is an American physicist who specializes in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). He is currently the chief scientist of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Jürgen Meyer-ter-Vehn is a German theoretical physicist who specializes in laser-plasma interactions at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. He published under the name Meyer until 1973.
Toshiki Tajima is a Japanese theoretical plasma physicist known for pioneering the laser wakefield acceleration technique with John M. Dawson in 1979. The technique is used to accelerate particles in a plasma and was experimentally realized in 1994, for which Tajima received several awards such as the Nishina Memorial Prize (2006), the Enrico Fermi Prize (2015), the Robert R. Wilson Prize (2019), the Hannes Alfvén Prize (2019) and the Charles Hard Townes Award (2020).
Warren Bicknell Mori is an American computational plasma physicist and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded the 2020 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics for his contributions to the theory and computer simulations of non-linear processes in plasma-based acceleration using kinetic theory, as well as for his research in relativistically intense lasers and beam-plasma interactions.
Non-linear inverse Compton scattering (NICS), also known as non-linear Compton scattering and multiphoton Compton scattering, is the scattering of multiple low-energy photons, given by an intense electromagnetic field, in a high-energy photon during the interaction with a charged particle, in many cases an electron. This process is an inverted variant of Compton scattering since, contrary to it, the charged particle transfers its energy to the outgoing high-energy photon instead of receiving energy from an incoming high-energy photon. Furthermore, differently from Compton scattering, this process is explicitly non-linear because the conditions for multiphoton absorption by the charged particle are reached in the presence of a very intense electromagnetic field, for example, the one produced by high-intensity lasers.
