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Recent progress towards nuclear fusion in the laboratory
Siegfried Glenzer, SLAC
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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. All life on earth depends on this process that powers our sun. The realization as an industrial energy source would have a tremendous impact on our society and would be the ultimate technique to combat climate change. In this talk, I will survey the National approach in the area of inertial confinement fusion and will summarize the very recent achievements in this field that include an increase in fusion energy yield by a factor of 100 since the first experiments begun on the National Ignition Facility about a decade ago. Several avenues towards fusion ignition and high yield are beginning to emerge where experiments on LCLS’s Matter in Extreme Conditions instrument are expected to make major contributions to advance the field.
About Siegfried Glenzer
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 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 2019 the doctor h. c. from the University of Rostock.
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Abstract: The demonstration of energy gain by nuclear fusion in the laboratory and its eventual utilization as an unlimited energy source has been a...
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