Stefan Weber, the leader of Research Programs 5 and 6 at ELI Beamlines, wrote an article which was selected as the best article of the journal High Power Laser Science and Engineering for 2015.
It is entitled “Temperature dependence of parametric instabilities in the context of the shock-ignition approach to inertial confinement fusion” and you can read it here.
Shock ignition (SI) is an alternative scheme to ignite pre-compressed fuel in an efficient and robust way, relaxing conditions on the degree of compression and illumination symmetry with respect to standard direct or indirect drive.
A major issue is the way laser-plasma interaction (LPI) is behaving under shock-ignition conditions. The research work shows that LPI instabilities are strongly temperature dependent and that therefore great care has to be taken to extrapolate experiments on existing facilities to planned final experiments on NIF or MegaJoule.
