Laser driven implosion

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Abstract
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) has made great progress. In fact several significant scientific firsts have been achieved in the last year. These developments have presented the ICF community with an opportunity to embark on a new phase in ICF research. The key issues of laser fusion are to attain a high absorption of laser light in a plasma, to prevent preheating of fuel during the compression, and to achieve highly efficient implosion by uniform compression of fuel due to the homogeneous deposition of laser energy on the pellet surface. Direct drive and indirect drive have been investigated. The progress in both schemes is remarkable. The neutron yield by the stagnation free compression of the LHART target has attained 1013 which corresponds to a pellet gain of 1/500. The plastic shell target has reached a fuel density as large as 600 times the liquid density which is measured by the Si activation method as well as the D knockon method. A cryogenic foam target is now under investigation.

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