The 4th International Conference on Matter and Radiation at Extremes (ICMRE 2019)

495 / 2019-03-18 21:36:48

Deuterium-Tritium Fusion in Intense Laser Fields

DT fusion,Intense laser fields,Fusion cross-section,Ignition condition

Plenary track > Fundamental Physics at Extremes

To avoid a serious energy crisis in the coming decades, many countries support controlled fusion energy research in the quest for the production of a better alternative energy. The Deuterium-Tritium (DT) fusion will be the most likely reaction to the first magnetic and inertial confinement fusion reactors for its large cross sections (about 5 barns) at the relatively modest energy of 64 keV and a large Q value of 17.6 MeV. Encouragingly, some major breakthroughs are being made by the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor located in Hefei. The talk will introduce my study of intense laser-driven DT fusion.
The interaction potential between two collision nuclei is characterized by a potential well of depth U_0=30-40MeV at distances within the geometrical touching radius R_n and the repulsive Coulomb potential at distances greater than R_n. A lucid and comprehensive exposition of the influence of a strong linearly polarized laser fields on the barrier penetrability, the fusion cross-section, the Maxwell-averaged fusion reactivity and the ignition condition (parameter nτ_ET) in MCF research have been down respectively. Numerical calculations of these physical quantities are performed by using the KH transformation. To be more specific, we defined a non-dimensional parameter N_d = S_0/R_n, where S_0 is a length parameter depending on the laser intensity I and frequency ω.
It is found that the maximal barrier penetrability is along the direction that the relative position vector is perpendicular to the laser polarization direction at specific conditions: N_d＞4. However, N_d can't be greater than 100 confined by the nonrelativistic limit and frequency. As a consequence, the fusion cross-section and the average reactivity show an increase of about 2 orders of magnitude, while the ignition condition (parameter nτ_ET) has a decrease. So the laser-driven DT fusion is promising.