Inertial confinement fusion

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Inertial confinement fusion compresses a millimetre-scale capsule of deuterium-tritium fuel so violently and so fast that the fuel's own inertia holds it together for the nanoseconds in which it burns. At the National Ignition Facility this is done indirectly: 192 laser beams deposit ultraviolet light inside a gold hohlraum, which re-radiates X-rays that ablate the capsule surface and drive the implosion inward. There is no magnetic field and no steady state; confinement time is set by how long the compressed fuel takes to fly apart, of order 100 picoseconds. The bet is the opposite of the magnetic one: extremely high density for an extremely short time, rather than low density for seconds. Inertial confinement produced the first laboratory demonstration of target gain above unity, on 5 December 2022.

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