The Progress and the State-of-Art Facilities of Inertial Confinement Fusion

Abstract

Abstract Contemporarily, as a tool to address issue of energy shortage, controlled fusion has become a hot technology. Although there are ways to achieve controlled fusion, it is currently not efficient enough to produce electricity based on power plant. The topic of this paper is to introduce a method of controlled nuclear fusion derived from laser technology, inertial confinement fusion. This research analyzed from plenty of angles in terms of its development in recent years. Firstly, the article proposes the concept of fusion and inertial confinement fusion. The main contradiction is the usage of compression to achieve high ignition points. In fact, the goal of this paper is to try to reach this ignition point in various ways. After demonstrating the basic concept of the inertial confinement fusion, mathematical expression for ignition and the principle of laser, it is found that its efficiency can be increased in several ways, i.e., amplifying lasers, adding magnetic field, and shock ignition that changes the waveform. It’s still not up to production standards, but inertial confinement fusion does give a path to achieve the goal. These results shed light on guiding further exploration for ICF as well as predict the future development direction.