Hole boring in a DT pellet and fast ion ignition with ultra-intense laser pulses

TL;DR

This paper explores how ultra-intense laser pulses can effectively bore holes in overdense plasmas and ignite precompressed DT fusion targets by accelerating ions to high energies, enabling potential advancements in fusion technology.

Contribution

It introduces a simple analytical model and simulations demonstrating deep plasma penetration and efficient ion acceleration at intensities above 10^22 W/cm2.

Findings

Laser pulses penetrate hundreds of microns into plasma

Ion acceleration efficiency exceeds 20%

Potential to heat fusion target cores to ignition conditions

Abstract

Recently achieved high intensities of short laser pulses open new prospects in their application to hole boring in inhomogeneous overdense plasmas and for ignition in precompressed DT fusion targets. A simple analytical model and numerical simulations demonstrate that pulses with intensities exceeding 1022 W/cm2 may penetrate deeply into the plasma as a result of efficient ponderomotive acceleration of ions in the forward direction. The penetration depth as big as hundreds of microns depends on the laser fluence, which has to exceed a few tens of GJ/cm2. The fast ions, accelerated at the bottom of the channel with an efficiency of more than 20%, show a high directionality and may heat the precompressed target core to fusion conditions.