Lasers Could Lead to Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough

The surface of the sun burns at a measly 10,000 degrees fahrenheit. On Wednesday, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory managed to produce a laser beam burning at 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature 200 times greater than the temperature of the sun’s surface.

The scientists said that the laser should be capable of producing a beam that is 3.6 million degrees, which, while still only a fraction the temperature of the sun’s core (which burns at ~28 million fahrenheit), is still quite impressive.

What’s the point of such a hot laser, you might ask? Well, turns out it is quite hard to figure out exactly what is going on inside the core of the sun. We know that the sun relies on nuclear fusion to produce the energy that keeps it glowing. And we know that the sun is made up largely of plasma, a form of superheated matter. But at the sun’s core, conditions have conspired to create a material known (quite intuitively, for once) as “hot dense matter.” This material is at the temperatures of plasma, but has the structure of more regular forms of matter. We think. We have never been able to get our hands on a sample, what with us not having the billions of pounds of pressure and insane temperatures laying around.

Until now, that is. This new laser, known as Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS for short) has managed to turn an extremely thin sheet of tin foil into hot dense matter. But the laser has some applications outside of modeling the insides of stars.

Apparently, the laser is actually able to peer inside of solid material, in much the same way that less powerful lasers have been used to study plasma. Scientists claim that this laser could be used to study molecular reactions, something which we can’t directly observe right now. Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is that, in a separate experiment, scientists demonstrated the laser was of producing an atomic level X-ray laser beam, something that could allow us to directly image the components of atoms.

Outside of research, however, scientists are salivating over the results for their benefits to fusion research. Lasers have long been considered viable sources of fusion energy, but their (comparatively) low energy densities have meant that actually triggering fusion with them is difficult. The National Ignition Lab has been trying for years to achieve fusion with its laser setup, which consists of 192 separate room-sized lasers trying to focus onto a space the size of a matchhead from a football field away. Needless to say, they’ve been having trouble getting everything lined up.

The new laser could drastically simplify matters. Line up a couple of these things and aim at a small point, and suddenly you have fusion. Who knows, this breakthrough might mean we’ll have fusion power plants in the next 10 years.

The State Column Photo by : Josh Work