Physics and Recent Progress of Laser Fusion

Abstract

The concept and related physical processes of laser fusion are summarized. The investigations on the absorption of laser light, energy transport, ablation and implosion hydrodynamics of a pellet are proceeded resulting in the accumulation of the data bases which are necessary for the scaling to the fusion ignition. The demonstration of the generation of 10¹³ neutrons per shot and the pellet gain of 0.2% by LHART give the feasibility to achieve the ignition condition with 100 kJ blue laser.