Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
The LLNL hydrogen target implodes in a nanosecond which is one billionth of a second. First, the explosion of plasma is driven by the laser beams and then continues to compress on its own inertia. Finally, the plasma expands because of the increasing central pressure of the compression. Bose said, “Getting a self-heated fusion chain reaction to start is called ignition.” Researchers at LLNL reported on their impressive new gains in their efforts on August 8th of this year.
Rochester’s OMEGA laser facility is smaller and uses a more direct-drive approach to achieve fusion. They do not use a gold can. Instead, the laser beams are aimed directly at the target sphere.
Bose and his team are pursuing a promising version of inertial confinement. They recently published their research in the journal Physical Review. They have applied extremely powerful magnets to the laser driven implosion. This may allow them to steer fusion reactions in ways that have not yet been explored.
The innovation of Bose and his team is to use a powerful magnetic field of fifty Tesla to control the charged particles in the plasma. Magnetic resonance imaging uses magnets than can produce a three Tesla field. The magnetic field of the Earth that shields us from the solar wind of charged particles is between twenty-five billionths of a Tesla and sixty-five billionths of a Tesla. Bose said, “You want the nuclei to fuse. The magnetic fields trap the charged particles and make them go around the field lines. That helps create collisions and that helps boost fusion. That's why adding magnetic fields has benefits for producing fusion energy.”
Fusion requires very extreme conditions, but Bose and his team have achieved them. The ultimate challenge is to get more energy output than input. The magnetic fields provide the push that can make this approach transformative. The experiments published in the journal Physical Review Letters were accomplished while Bose was doing postdoctoral research at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He continues to collaborate with that laboratory.
Bose said that he was attracted to the University of Delaware partly because of the focus on plasma physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy where William Matthaeus, Michael Shay and Ben Maruca. He said, "They do studies and analysis of data coming from the NASA solar program and all its missions. We conduct laboratory astrophysics experiments where these phenomena are scaled down in space and time to the lab. This gives us a means to unravel some of the intricate physics questions posed by NASA missions.”
Students are an important part of Bose’s work. Their careers can see great advancement in this new field of study. Bose said, “It is a fascinating part of science and students are a very important part of workforce development for the national labs. Students experienced in this science and technology often end up as scientists and researchers at the national labs. We won't have a solution tomorrow. But what we're doing is contributing to a solution for clean energy.”