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Billion-times more efficient nuclear fusion could be unlocked with low-frequency lasers (interestingengineering.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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...“The calculation results show enhancements of fusion yields by orders of magnitude with currently available intense low-frequency laser fields,” highlighted the study.

For a collision energy of 1 keV—a level where fusion is normally almost impossible—the application of a 1.55 eV low-frequency laser can transform the reaction rate.

At 10^20 W/cm² intensity, the fusion probability increases by three orders of magnitude, while increasing the intensity to 5×10^21 W/cm² boosts the efficiency by a staggering nine orders of magnitude.

This dramatic increase effectively makes fusion at 1 keV (relatively low temperature) as probable as fusion at 10 keV without laser assistance...

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[–] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

This is kind of a silly paper, we don't directly hit thermonuclear fuel with lasers, nor do we use x-ray band lasers, like anywhere. Also, you should always take new fusion ideas with a grain of salt. A million fusion startups have popped up in the past year, and 99% of them exist solely to drain venture capitalists of money while they accomplish nothing. Each startup needs to come up with a unique idea that's never been tested to convince their investors they're actually onto something.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Since it sounds like you know what you're talking about, out of curiosity, how do you feel about SPARC?

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Tokamak's get their own section at fusion conferences, the rest of us don't go to their talks, and those talks never seem to change. The most important thing to remember is that any success in a tokamak is absurdly irreproducible. Next time you see an article about a tokamak breaking a record, remember to add the context that it failed to set that record the last 1000 times they turned it on, and they didn't really do anything different the time it worked.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Is it the same with stellarators?

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    Yeah, pretty much. The problem is they're always focusing on their own problems. It's always a hardware problem, and there's no physics to be learned from it, so it's not useful work to anyone who isn't building a similar system. If you pretend that fusion is purely an engineering problem, that would be fine, but we still don't really have a solid physics understanding of everything that goes into a fusion system.

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