V4F in Edinburgh

In the second week of February, the V4F consortium held their penultimate in-person consortium meeting in the beautiful city of Edinburgh in Scotland. Over two days, we had many open discussions of progress and challenges we have encountered, making an honest assessment of our limitations. Our shared focus remains on turning complex physics into measurable progress.

We’ve made strong progress across several fronts, from advancing orbital angular momentum (OAM) generation and amplification, supported by recent experimental results and clear next steps toward plasma‑based amplification, to developing more sophisticated models of OAM generation, plasma interactions, and magnetic field formation. At the same time, there have been significant breakthroughs in structured and foam targets for proton–boron fusion, including promising new concepts inspired by micro‑structure physics.

This impressive progress is evidenced by the publications produced by our consortium: Over the past 6 months, 1 peer-reviewed paper has been published and 3 manuscripts have been submitted for peer review:

Interaction of Laguerre–Gaussian laser pulses with borane targets of different hydrogen–boron ratio

Optical Vortex Dynamics in non-uniform twisted Ring-Core Fibers

Power-Scalable Generation of High-Order Optical Vortices Via Coherent Beam Combining

High-purity amplification of circularly polarized orbital angular momentum modes in an active spun ring-core tapered fiber

With just 10 months to go until project end, our work is in full swing and we are now gearing up for our final proof-of principle experiments demonstrating the use of OAM beams for nuclear fusion. We're excited for the coming months, stay tuned for more!