New circuit may lead to practical ICF

摘要

For more than two decades, photographs of test firings at Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine inertial confinement fusion facility and its predecessor, the Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator, have graced numerous technology-related and general-interest magazines (including this one). The photos, showing brightly colored webs of electrical discharges above the target chamber, may soon become relics of the past because a new circuit that directs more energy on fusion targets more frequently—and without the dispersal that had produced the photogenic discharges— has been tested successfully at Sandia and promises to be scalable into a driver for practical energy production.