Abstract
The first demonstration of fast heating of highly imploded fusion plasmas has been made by using a novel target geometry (cone shell target) with an ultra-intense short pulse laser. Significant enhancement of thermal neutron yield has been realized with sub-ps PW laser heating, confirming that the high heating efficiency is maintained as the short-pulse laser power is substantially increased to near equivalent power to the ignition condition. The efficient heating could be caused by the efficient guiding of heating pulse with the hollow cone and self-organized relativistic electron transport (conductivity channel) from the recent basic experimental results. According to all the results, we are now developing a 10 kJ-PW laser system to study the ignitionequivalent temperature heating physics. The development of such high energy PW lasers will also promote new scientific applications such as high energy-density physics.
