First measurement in a magnetic confinement fusion experiment of the H3+H3→He5+n intermediate two-body resonant reaction

Abstract

We report on the first experimental measurements made at a magnetic confinement fusion device of the tritium(T)-tritium(T) reaction T+T→He4+2n indicating the presence of the intermediate two-body resonant reaction T+T→He5+n. During the second deuterium-tritium campaign (DTE2) at the Joint European Torus, measurements of fusion plasmas with high tritium concentrations, nT/(nT+nD)≈0.99, heated with tritium neutral beam injection, were performed using the neutron time-of-flight (TOF) spectrometer TOFOR. We detect a peak in the neutron emission TOF spectrum consistent with the two-body resonant reaction. The TT neutron emission energy spectrum is modeled using an R-matrix framework where the distributions of the most likely model parameters given our experimental TOF data are determined utilizing a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. We compare our best estimate of the T+T neutron emission energy spectrum with results obtained at inertial confinement fusion experiments at the OMEGA facility and find a spectral shape that is consistent with the energy dependency in the neutron spectrum observed at OMEGA. Published by the American Physical Society 2024