Laser-plasma interaction for application to fusion energy

Computations are to be performed using the laser driven inertial fusion energy option based on volume ignition with the natural adiabatic self-similarity compression and expansion hydrodynamics (Hora et al. 1997). The numerical work includes the establishing of a multi-branch reaction code to be used for simultaneous fusion reactions of D-D, D-T, D-He3 and mutual nuclear reaction products. This will permit the studies of neutron lean reactions as well as tritium-rich cases (Osman et al. 2002). The D-T reactions will stress the recent new results on one step laser fusion (Hora et al. 2001) as an alternative to the two-step fast ignitor scheme whose difficulties with new physics phenomena at petawatt laser interaction are more and more evident (Osman et al. 2003; Hora et al. 2003).