As in the song "Lawyers In Love" we have a land, a nation with too many in high places willing to do anything for money neglecting people, honor and principle but a change is coming. No more falling for the lie of living only individualistic and independent lives leaving us divided and conquerable by powerful special interests but a people, a nation collaborating for the greater common good in various groups all across the nation. A land of people working together to help one another with a vision moreover as Jesus would have us be. Love, Mercy, Forgiveness, Kindness....something about another Land. The change is coming

Saturday, March 24, 2018

In Colorado State University Lab, Laser-Heated Nanowires Produce Micro-Scale Nuclear Fusion with Record Efficiency

The target chamber (front) and ultra-high density laser (back) used in the micro-scale fusion experiments at CSU. Credit: Advanced Beam Laboratory
Nuclear fusion, the process that powers our sun, happens when nuclear reactions between light elements produce heavier ones. It’s also happening – at a smaller scale – in a Colorado State University laboratory.
Using a compact but powerful laser to heat arrays of ordered nanowires, CSU scientists and collaborators have demonstrated micro-scale nuclear fusion in the lab. They have achieved record-setting efficiency for the generation of neutrons – chargeless sub-atomic particles resulting from the fusion process. Their work is detailed in a paper published in Nature Communicationsand is led by Jorge Rocca, University Distinguished Professor in electrical and computer engineering and physics. The paper’s first author is Alden Curtis, a CSU graduate student.
Laser-driven controlled fusion experiments are typically done with multi-hundred-million-dollar lasers housed in stadium-sized buildings. Such experiments are usually geared toward harnessing fusion for clean energy applications.
In contrast, Rocca’s team of students, research scientists and collaborators work with an ultra-fast, high-powered tabletop laser they built from scratch. They use their fast, pulsed laser to irradiate a target of invisible wires and instantly create extremely hot, dense plasmas – with conditions approaching those inside the sun. These plasmas drive fusion reactions, giving off helium and flashes of energetic neutrons.

Irradiating nanowires

In their Nature Communications experiment, the team produced a record number of neutrons per unit of laser energy – about 500 times better than experiments that use conventional flat targets from the same material. Their laser’s target was an array of nanowires made out of a material called deuterated polyethylene. The material is similar to the widely used polyethylene plastic, but its common hydrogen atoms are substituted by deuterium, a heavier kind of hydrogen atom.
The efforts were supported by intensive computer simulations conducted at the University of Dusseldorf (Germany), and at CSU.
Making fusion neutrons efficiently, at a small scale, could lead to advances in neutron-based imaging, and neutron probes to gain insight on the structure and properties of materials. The results also contribute to understanding interactions of ultra-intense laser light with matter.
The paper is titled “Micro-scale fusion in dense relativistic nanowire array plasmas.” The research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and by Mission Support Test Services, LLC.

Top left: A scanning electron microscope image of aligned deuterated polyethylene nanowires. The other panels are 3-D simulations of the nanowires rapidly exploding following irradiation by the ultra-intense laser pulse. Credit: Advanced Beam Laboratory

- Anne Manning

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