188
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
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

...“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...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent