DIFFER
DIFFER EVENT

DIFFER seminar: Demonstration of ignition and a burning fusion plasma on the National Ignition Facility

The demonstration of nuclear fusion in the laboratory and eventual utilization as an unlimited energy source has been a grand challenge for physicists and engineers for 70 years. The realization as an industrial energy source would have a tremendous impact on our society and would change our approach to energy policy and climate change. In this talk, I will present the very recent achievement of energy gain from DT plasmas in indirectly driven inertial confinement fusion implosions. These experiments achieve fusion powers of over 40 PW. This achievement came after increasing the fusion energy yield by a factor of 1,000 since the first experiments on the National Ignition Facility about a decade ago. Several avenues towards fusion ignition and high yield are beginning to emerge where future laser and target technology developments will be needed. I will review these efforts and will discuss the role of the emerging private industry in this field.

Bio: 
Siegfried Glenzer is professor in the photon science faculty and the director of the high energy density science division at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He joined SLAC as a distinguished scientist in 2013 to build a new program exploring matter in extreme conditions using high-power lasers and the Linac Coherent Light Source, SLAC's X-ray laser.

Glenzer did his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, where he received his PhD in 1994. He then went to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow and, in time, became the laboratory's group leader for plasma physics. At Livermore, he led the first inertial confinement fusion experiments on the National Ignition Facility. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and a senior Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow at the University of Rostock and the Deutsche Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. Glenzer is a fellow of the American Physical Society and was awarded the society’s 2003 and 2022 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. In 2014, he received the Ernest O. Lawrence Award of the U. S. Department of Energy and in 2022 the Fulbright award from the U. S. Department of State.
 

Date
-
Chair
Ivo Classen
Location
Colloquium room DIFFER and online
Speaker
Siegfried H. Glenzer
Affiliation
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025, U.S.A.

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