Shock Ignition: A New Approach to High Gain Inertial Confinement Fusion on the National Ignition Facility.

摘要

Shock ignition, a new concept for igniting thermonuclear fuel [1], is explored as a potential approach to high gain, inertial confinement fusion targets for the National Ignition Facility (NIF). In shock ignition, fusion fuel is separately ignited by a strong spherically-converging shock and, because the capsule implosion velocity is significantly less than that required for conventional ignition targets, more fuel mass can be assembled for a given laser drive energy. The benefits of decoupling compression from ignition on NIF is that an order-of-magnitude higher fusion energy gains/yields are potentially achievable. Initial results indicate thermonuclear yields of ~120-250MJ may be possible with laser drive energies of 1-1.6MJ, while gains of around 50 should still be achievable at only ~170kJ drive energy.