Imagine trying to summon the sun to your research laboratory.
August 11, 2022
Imagine trying to summon the sun to your research laboratory.
Yes, you, big bright star! Bring your searing heat, the drama of your core’s constant nuclear fusion and your off-the-charts energy levels with you. We want to know how to make this fusion energy happen here on Earth—at will and efficiently—so we can cross „energy supply“ off our list of worries forever.
But, of course, the sun can’t actually get to the lab. It lives too far away—some 93 million miles—and it is way too big (about 864,000 miles in diameter). It’s also way too hot and denser than anything on Earth. That’s why it can sustain the reactions that generate all the energy that powers life on Earth.
This has not discouraged scientists from pursuing their quest for nuclear fusion, of course.
Instead, they have found extraordinary ways—using intense lasers and hydrogen fuel—to produce extreme conditions like those that exist in the sun’s core, producing nuclear fusion in tiny 1 millimeter plastic capsules. This approach is called „inertial confinement fusion.“
The challenge is to create a system that generates more fusion energy than is required to create it.
This is exceptionally challenging because it requires high-precision experiments at extreme conditions, but researchers have made major advances in the science and technology required to produce controlled laboratory fusion in recent decades.
Now University of Delaware researcher Arijit Bose and his collaborators are pursuing a promising variation of this approach. Their work was published recently in Physical Review Letters.
They have applied powerful magnetic fields to the laser-driven implosion, which may allow them to steer fusion reactions in ways previously unexplored in experiments.
Bose, an assistant professor in UD’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, started his study of nuclear fusion during graduate school at the University of Rochester.
After touring the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at Rochester, where lasers are used to implode spherical capsules and create plasmas, known as „inertial confinement fusion,“ he found a focus for his own research.
