Indirect-drive Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have, for the first time, demonstrated fusion ignition in the laboratory. This milestone occurred for the first time in an experiment conducted on December 5 th , 2022, releasing 3.15 MJ of energy from the deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion reaction using 2.05 MJ of laser energy for a target gain of 1.5. This talk will describe this and more recent ignition experiments, chronicle some of the important scientific and technological developments that contributed to the increase in experimental fusion energy output that occurred between 2011 and today, and the prospects of harnessing fusion in the laboratory as an energy source.
Keywords
- Fusion
- Ignition