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Self-heating plasmas offer hope for energy from fusion
Experiments have validated a way of producing nuclear energy known as laser-driven fusion, in which a plasma is heated and compressed. The milestone offers crucial evidence that the plasma can supply its own heat.
Many of the world’s current energy sources are both unsustainable and harmful to the environment, so the idea that a relatively safe fuel is abundant in seawater will come as welcome news to many. But the energy is released in the process of nuclear fusion, in which two atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus — a difficult scientific and engineering feat to achieve, with many unanswered questions. Writing in Nature, Zylstra et al.1 answer one such question by showing that, in the laser-driven approach to fusion, in which a plasma is compressed and heated, the plasma can be further heated by the fusion reactions themselves — a key requirement for self-sustaining fusion energy. Companion papers from the same group of researchers, by Kritcher et al.2 in Nature Physics and Ross et al.3 on the arXiv preprint server, detail the process of optimizing the experiment design.