IFS Seminar

Abstract: Research activities on heavy-ion fusion (HIF) have been

abandoned over a decade ago, and brought down to a crawl even much

earlier. It is easy to forget that in the 90’s HIF was considered to be the

top contender for developing inertial fusion energy (IFE). This is not

surprising: accelerator technology is well-established, and the conver-

sion efficiency from a wall plug to accelerated particles is hard to match,

especially at the high repetition rates required for IFE power-plants.

Moreover, unlike most laser fusion schemes, HIF does not require any

damageable optics. One of the often-cited reasons for abandoning HIF

is its non- modular nature: testing even the most basic components,

like ion-heated hohlraums, requires multi-km long induction accelera-

tors. However, high-gradient collective ion acceleration has the poten-

tial for drastic reduction of the driver size – an important step towards

modularity. I will describe the historical context for such schemes and

describe the latest efforts in my group to improve them. Other op-

portunities for fusion-relevant ion acceleration, such as ultra- intense

laser-target interactions for fast ignition of IFE targets, will also be

discussed.