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A team from the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the project aimed at reproduce the nuclear fusion of stars on Earth at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, reported that it had tripled the energy produced during experiments using magnetic fields for plasma confinement. These magnetic fields are added to the lasers already used for the inertial confinement of the plasma.
Using this new configuration, it is possible to increase the temperature of thehotspotsthe critical point, “approaching what is required to start the merger”. The interesting study was published on Physical Review Letters.
“Magnetic field enters and acts like an insulator”John Moody, a senior scientist at NIF who led the study, illustrated in a telephone interview with motherboard. “There’s what we call a ‘hotspot’. It’s at millions of degrees and the environment around it is just room temperature. All that heat wants to escape, because it tends to always go from hot to cold and the magnetic field prevents that happen.”
Moody then went on to say: “When we put the magnetic field on this hot spot, we isolate it, and the heat stays there. This way we are able to get the hot spot to a higher temperature.”has explained. “You get more reactions [di fusione] as you get warmer, which is why we see an improvement in responsiveness.”
The creation of the hotspot was made possible by nearly shooting 200 lasers on a tiny pellet of fuel, composed of the heavier isotopes of hydrogen, such as deuterium and tritium.
These bursts of lasers generate X-raycausing the implosion of the small capsule and producing the extreme pressure and temperature necessary to cause isotopes to melt and cause them to release energy.
The ball had previously been wrapped in a coil made with special metals to retain the heat and energy deriving from the laser bombardment, thus creating a hotspotsone step closer at the level of temperature and energy needed to reach the burning plasmaof which we have already spoken.
Research has followed in the footsteps of an experiment held in 2012 at the OMEGA facility at the University of Rochesterwho discovered how the magnets could raise the temperature of fusion fuel.
Today the NIF team was able to accomplish a major step forward by achieving the largest increase in temperature and energy ever with a magnetized fusion experiment, due to their unique experimental setup.
Magnets are also used in tokamaks for plasma confinement
The hotspot of the NIF it was 40% hotter and produced more than three times the energy yieldcompared to previous experiments, a better result than any forecast.
The researchers plan to conduct more fusion experiments with magnetic fieldsincluding a version with a cryogenic fuel capsule covered with iceto better understand the mysterious physics at work in these extreme systems.
“The fact that we have seen a major improvement in yield [del previsto] it was really amazing”Moody said. “We’re still trying to figure out why. Whenever there’s a difference between experiment and theory, there’s a lot you can learn by trying to figure out what happened.”
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