Magnetic Liner Inertial Fusion

2015:

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced a two-year, $3.8 million award for Sandia National Laboratories and the LLE to study the potential of combining two different technologies to further advance their research efforts to produce controlled fusion reactions. The award seeks to build upon the successes of Sandia’s magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF) concept. MagLIF is an innovative magneto-inertial fusion concept that exploits advances in pulsed-power technology.

“The ARPA-E award will fund research that will benefit from the existing strong collaborative effort between Sandia National Laboratories and LLE,” said Professor and LLE Director Robert L. McCrory. “LLE, with its 60-beam OMEGA and four-beam high-energy OMEGA EP lasers, and Sandia, with the world’s largest pulsed-power machine, Z, provide unique capabilities to explore a range of fusion parameters previously unexplored.”

“Creating a high-output reaction in a MagLIF plasma at Z should demonstrate the promise of the broader field of research we call magneto-inertial fusion–a potentially inexpensive form of fusion,” said project lead and Sandia manager Dan Sinars. “We hope that the results of our research will motivate more efforts in this area.”

Shown here is collaborators from Sandia National Laboratories and LLE perform experiments on the OMEGA EP Laser System that test the effects of applied magnetic fields on laser preheat in the MagLIF scheme