Progress at the Halfway Mark

We are almost at the halfway mark of V4F, and thought that it would be a good time to take a step back and review our progress so far. Things have gone rather smooth so far, with lots of progress on all ends.

Molecular structure of anti-B18H22. Green atoms are boron, white atoms are hydrogen.

We have progressed our novel technology to generate OAM beams, called AHTF. This stands for Active Helical Tapered double-clad Fiber with ring-shaped core and is one of our three main project innovations, as published on the innovation-radar website here.

In August and September, we were also fortunate to have received 2 months of experimental time at the Prague Asterix Laser System for work on the investigation of borane targets for alpha-particle generation. While we are still in the process of analysing the huge amount of data generated, we already have compiled the data from our first experimental campaign into a not-yet-peer-reviewed article. You can find the article on arXiv here.

Underpinned by extensive computational models for both the fiber technology and the interaction between laser and target, we are still on track to achieve the ultimate goal of V4F: Demonstrating lowered thresholds for aneutronic fusion in borane targets using OAM beams.