Evidence found of ions behaving differently than expected in fusion reactions

Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.

A team of researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have found evidence of ion behavior that is different than expected.

The group describes their study in a paper published in the journal Nature physics. An overview of the work being done at the NIF and the effort being conducted by the team to better understand the unexpected ion behavior has been published in a News & Views piece.

Scientists around the world have been trying to duplicate the fusion reactions that occur in the sun for a long time. Researchers have been working step-by-step to find the right combination of factors to produce more energy.

A cylinder containing a sphere of deuterium and tritium is being fired at by the team at NIF. A large amount of energy is released when the atoms in the sphere are fused to helium atoms. Without continuous firing of the lasers, the problem remains.

The heat builds up in the sphere. During the highest-performing stages of the experiment, the researchers found that the ion inside of the plasma had higher energy than expected.

This finding means that theorists will have to modify their theories before they can conduct more experiments. The researchers may find a way to achieve ignition if they modify the theory to explain the higher energy.

Evidence for suprathermal ion distribution in burning plasmas was presented.

The author is Stefano Atzeni. The DOI is 10.1038/s41567-0201-8.

Journal information: Nature Physics

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