The rapid progress in high energy, high power, high intensity lasers has tremendously increased the power flux that can be delivered into plasmas. A compelling motivation for that is to drive ion accelerators that are increasingly compact and deliver higher particle currents, making them a suitable ignitor beam for inertial confinement fusion (ICF). Beyond the limits from electrical breakdown in conventional accelerator structures, plasmas can support much larger electric fields (> TV/m) and current densities (e.g., > 1012 protons / ps / (10 μm)2 in some present-day experiments), enabling very short and intense bursts of ions with very high energies. Driving such ion beams requires very high power densities, and such lasers are ideally suited to provide them. The prospect of lasers with increased efficiency, energy, repetition rate and pulse-shape control at the ∼ 10 fs level promises laser-driven ion beams with the parameters necessary for a fusion reactor. Specifically, creating the hot spot to ignite suitably compressed D-T fuel requires very high power densities, ∼1022 W/cm3, which quantifies the challenge ahead.
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机译：高能量，高功率，高强度激光器的迅速发展极大地增加了可以传递到等离子体中的功率通量。为此，一个令人信服的动机是驱动越来越紧凑的离子加速器并提供更高的粒子流，使其成为惯性约束聚变（ICF）的合适点火器束。除了传统加速器结构中的电击穿限制之外，等离子体还可以支持更大的电场（> TV / m）和电流密度（例如，> 10 12 质子/ ps /（10μm） 2 （在当前的一些实验中），可以使非常短且强烈的离子爆发具有非常高的能量。驱动这样的离子束需要非常高的功率密度，并且这样的激光器非常适合于提供它们。激光的效率，能量，重复频率和脉冲形状控制在约10 fs的水平上得到了提高，有望实现具有聚变反应堆所需参数的激光驱动离子束。具体而言，产生热点以点燃适当压缩的D-T燃料需要很高的功率密度，约为10 22 W / cm 3 ，这量化了未来的挑战。
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