…“The calculation results show enhancements of fusion yields by orders of magnitude with currently available intense low-frequency laser fields,” highlighted the study.
For a collision energy of 1 keV—a level where fusion is normally almost impossible—the application of a 1.55 eV low-frequency laser can transform the reaction rate.
At 10^20 W/cm² intensity, the fusion probability increases by three orders of magnitude, while increasing the intensity to 5×10^21 W/cm² boosts the efficiency by a staggering nine orders of magnitude.
This dramatic increase effectively makes fusion at 1 keV (relatively low temperature) as probable as fusion at 10 keV without laser assistance…
Is it the same with stellarators?
Yeah, pretty much. The problem is they’re always focusing on their own problems. It’s always a hardware problem, and there’s no physics to be learned from it, so it’s not useful work to anyone who isn’t building a similar system. If you pretend that fusion is purely an engineering problem, that would be fine, but we still don’t really have a solid physics understanding of everything that goes into a fusion system.