PROTON beams accelerated to within a whisker of the speed of light might be
able to trigger self-sustaining fusion reactions, suggest Mike Perry and his
colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Lasers can accelerate protons to energies of tens of millions of
electronvolts within distances equal to the width of a human hair. The team’s
idea is to compress a tiny pellet filled with deuterium and tritium using
X-rays, and then trigger a fusion reaction inside it using a proton beam, a
technique known as fast ignition (Physical Review Letters, vol 86, p
436). Reactions triggered by…
