Our exciting new project with a fresh approach to bring nuclear fusion closer to reality has begun. The members of the V4F research consortium met at the beautiful, historic Vila Lanna in Prague to plan and discuss the first steps in the project.
We aim to show proof-of-principle of a new technology capable of unprecedented control over interactions with specially synthesised targets significantly improving the energy balance of aneutronic fusion reactions. This work offers the tantalising possibility of aneutronic fusion as a waste-free nuclear energy source and radical new configurations of particle accelerators, leading to an efficient positron beam acceleration. The results will benefit society with game-changing new approaches to clean, safe energy production and significant downscaling of positron accelerators with dramatic impacts in medicine, industry and fundamental science.
While in Prague, we took the opportunity to visit the Prague Asterix Laser System (PALS) at the Institute for Plasma Physics.
The PALS system is used for research of interaction with matter of focused high-power laser beams of a power density of 1014-1016 W/cm2 and for studies of hot laser-produced plasmas. The main lines of research pursued using the PALS system include:
development and application of plasma-based point sources of non-coherent soft x-rays,
development and application of plasma-based soft x-ray lasers,
development and application laser plasma sources of highly-charged high-energy ions,
study of matter in conditions of extreme pressures and temperatures, with respect to the needs of material sciences, laboratory astrophysics, thermonuclear research and other scientific fields.
A team from the Institute, led by Dr Miroslav Krus, is participating in the V4F project and experiments made with the PALS system will give us important initial results for our project.