Direct Drive and Fast Ignition Workshop 2025

In this work, we analyze the energy loss of 4+ carbon projectiles at an energy of 0.6 MeV/u as they pass through a carbon plasma of the experiment to be carried out at GSI within the LIGHT (Laser Ion Generation, Handing and Transport) project. In this experiment, the aim is to measure the energy loss of carbon ions as they pass through a laser-generated carbon plasma. LIGHT provides ion pulse...

In TNSA-driven laser-plasma interaction, a crucial role is played by different sources of instabilities that can alter ion and proton acceleration in nominally identical conditions. Such instabilities can strongly affect the reproducibility of sequential shots.
The significative improvements in laser technology and in high repetition lasers, allow to investigate involved physical phenomena...

Double-Cone Ignition (DCI) is an innovative direct-drive scheme that employs oppositely placed gold cones to constrain the target shell assembly. Compared to spherical targets, DCI reduces the ns-laser irradiation solid angle, offering the potential for achieving implosion with lower driver energy. However, this requires a tailored irradiation scheme for DCI targets: the non-spherical geometry...

This work analyzes the charge state and energy loss of Ar+16 projectiles traversing partially ionized carbon plasmas. The study combines the Cross Section Model - 2 (CSM-2) with hydrodynamic simulations to predict projectile charge states, plasma stopping power, and projectile energy loss under realistic plasma conditions. The model considers NLTE (Non-Local Thermal Equilibrium) ionization...

To support high-repetition-rate applications such as radioisotope production and laser-driven fusion, liquid targets are being developed at ELI-NP. With modern laser systems operating at repetition rates up to 100 kHz, these targets must regenerate rapidly to ensure consistent interaction conditions. In this study, we investigated the regeneration dynamics of a water pellicle formed in low...

The demonstration of ignition and net energy gain at the National Ignition Facility has paved the way for inertial fusion energy. The company Focused Energy is working on a pre-conceptual design of an inertial fusion pilot plant based on laser direct-drive that provides sufficient fusion gain, stable long-term operation, and cost efficiency.
One of the scientific challenges for direct-drive...

The transport process of intense ion beams in dense plasma is fundamentally relevant to high-energy-density physics, inertial confinement fusion, fast ignition, and related fields. In this study, the transportation behavior of laser-accelerated intense proton beam in a well-defined dense plasma(with a length L~1mm, temperature T~17eV, and electron density ne~4×1020cm-3) was measured. The...

The main challenge for efficient laser energy deposition in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is stimulated laser scattering on plasma waves. Various optical laser beam smoothing techniques used over the years, such as random phase plates (RPP) and smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD), appear inadequate for mitigating parametric instabilities. Following the success of ignition at the...

Important to the study of beam-driven inertial confinement fusion (ICF) as well as $\alpha$-heating is an accurate description of the properties of ion beams directed at a target plasma. As an example, we consider here an ion beam directed at a non-degenerate, homogenous, and isotropic electron gas. We investigate the stopping power but also more intricate properties such as those...

Laser-accelerated ions typically exhibit an exponential energy spectrum up to a characteristic cut-off energy, which is a signature of target normal sheath acceleration (TNSA) [1]. However, many applications, such as proton therapy [2] or the fast ignition concept in inertial confinement fusion [3] benefit from well defined spectral shapes.

By introducing multiple ion species into the...

The HERA platform is dedicated to modelling the physics of laser-plasma interactions in the context of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research. In ICF, multi-kJ lasers propagate through a long and hot plasma. During their propagation, the lasers experience various instabilities that affect the beam quality (energy loss or beam breaking). However, these detrimental effects are partially...

This preliminary study will help in ion-plasma interactions within the Geant4 Monte Carlo toolkit to advance the modeling of proton-boron-11 (p-11B) fusion, a promising aneutronic energy source. The primary objective is to develop a simulation framework for calculating alpha particle stopping power in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) plasmas under extreme conditions: temperatures of 100 300...