Research on fast ignition carried out on the Shenguang Ⅱ Upgrade (SGIIU) high power laser facility under development by the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently led to a major breakthrough on indirect-drive fast-ignition fusion. The result was published in Nature Physics.

As the first physical experiment platform in China to support fast ignition for laser inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research, the SGIIU started its run-in in 2016 after nearly ten years of development. The device is composed of eight beams of ten-thousand joule nanosecond (ns) laser and one-kilojoule picosecond laser (ps). The ns laser has the ability to make precise adjustments to the whole beam such as arbitrary pulse shaping and smooth focal spot creation. The ps beam’s focal spot can reach <25μm, with power density >10¹⁹W/cm² and beam contrast >10⁸, while the pulse is adjustable between 0.5~10ps.

With its excellent output performance such as high energy, high focus power density, high aiming accuracy, high synchronization accuracy, and ps beam combined with ns beams for shooting, the SGIIU can satisfy complex physical experiments and widely serve laser nuclear fusion fast ignition, laboratory astrophysics, laser driven particle beams, nuclear medicine, plasma physics and other frontier research areas. It has already gained a series of important achievements.

Fig1. The experiment setup on SGIIU [IMAGE: SIOM]

Fig2. The neutron yield obtained from SGIIU [IMAGE: SIOM]

In this new experiment, by using indirect laser driven fast ignition to obtain a high level of implosion neutron production, the research team innovatively used an indirect shooting method to pre-compress the target on the SGIIU, which overcame many defects of traditional fast ignition and increased the implosion neutron yield by 280 times, significantly improving fast ignition energy coupling efficiency.

This work was jointly completed by the Laser Fusion Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Beijing Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the National University of Defense Technology, Peking University, Shenzhen University of Technology, and SIOM.

For more information, please contact:

Mr. Cao Yong

Email: caoyong@siom.ac.cn

General Administrative Office

Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Source: Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics,

Chinese Academy of Sciences