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By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News
The world's most powerful laser has heated matter to a truly sweltering 10
million Celsius.
The Vulcan laser concentrated energy equivalent to 100 times the world's
electricity production into a spot just a few millionths of a metre across.
Writing in the New Journal of Physics, scientists said they could create the
conditions for fractions of a second.
The experiments demonstrated concepts which could be key to building a future
nuclear fusion reactor.
The UK has proposed an even more powerful laser facility, known as Hiper (High
Power laser Energy Research), which will study the feasibility of laser fusion
as a potential future energy source.
"Hiper is a proposed, very large-scale facility and so we have to check that
our understanding is correct," explained Professor Peter Norreys of the
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire where the experiments took
place.
Extreme condition
Nuclear fusion is looked on as a panacea in a world that demands ever
increasing amounts of energy.
The fuel for the process is deuterium and tritium, two heavier forms of
hydrogen that are commonly found in seawater.
When these isotopes are combined at high temperatures, a small amount of mass
is lost and a colossal amount of energy is released. By-products are no more
radioactive than hospital waste.
The process naturally occurs in the core of the Sun where huge gravitational
pressure allows this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million Celsius.
At the much lower pressures on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion would need
to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius.
Ultra powerful lasers, such as Hiper, have been proposed as one method for
reaching these extreme conditions, although many remain sceptical about the
technique.
The project has been drawn up to capitalise on another project at the National
Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California.
NIF is expected to demonstrate energy production from laser driven fusion
between 2010 and 2012.
If proven, the technology could rival the current favoured technique for
initiating fusion which uses superconducting magnets to contain and fuse the
hydrogen nuclei.
This technique will be used in the 10bn-euro International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (Iter) currently being built in Cadarache, southern
France.
Energy boost
The new work laid some of the foundations for Hiper.
In the experiments, the Vulcan laser focused one petawatt (1,000 trillion
watts) of power into a spot about one tenth of the width of a human hair.
The pulse lasted for one picosecond (one trillionth of a second), heating the
target to 10 million Celsius, one tenth of that required for nuclear fusion.
However, even at these relatively balmy temperatures, the conditions were
equivalent to these found in supernova explosions.
A special high-speed camera probed the fleeting moment.
"We wanted to understand the basic interaction of matter with these laser
pulses," Professor Norreys told BBC News.
Specifically, the team wanted to understand how much energy was transferred
from the laser to the target.
"Efficient coupling of the laser energy to the target is crucial for fast
ignition fusion, and is one of the main questions on which the design of Hiper
depends," said Dr Jonathan Davies from Instituto Superior Technico, Lisbon,
Portugal, who also took part in the study.