AUSTRALIA - UWS/UNSW

CENTRE FOR FUSION ENERGY RESEARCH
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY / UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

Reynaldo Castillo, Campbelltown-Macarthur 2460

Telephone: +61 2 4620 3208; +61 2 9547 1424
Telefax: +61 2 4620 3025; +61 2 9546 1764

Castillo, Reynaldo (Co-Director)¹
Hora, Heinrich (Co-Director)^1,2
Chan, W.-K.¹

Kelly, Jak²
Lee, Alexander Iowa¹
McMillan, Patrick²

Neely, Donald¹
Osman, Frederick²
Stening, Robert John²

Research activities:
Codes are developed and evaluated for a new ICF one step volume ignition scheme with nanosecond irradiation and ignition temperatures between 300 and 800 eV for very high compression and high energy laser or heavy ion beam pulses. This is a continuation of long years of research based on the fact that the measured highest DT fusion gains perfectly followed the adiabatic volume compression (J. Plasma Physics 60 (1998) 743). For the two step method (nanosecond high density compression and femtosecond additional energy deposition for central or peripheral ignition, known as fast ignitor), the relativistic self-focusing is studied on a new basis (J. Plasma Physics 61 (1999) 263) testing various orders of the paraxial approximation, defocusing, monodromy and singularities apart from other properties. The suppression of 10ps stochastic pulsation by laser beam smoothing (Phys. Rev. A45 (1992) 6123; Laser and Particle Beams 17 (1999) 209) is studied in order to overcome the difficulties for the big laser facilities NIF and LMJ (Phys. Today Jan. 2001 p. 21) by using red laser light. This is saving the costs for the big single crystals for harmonics generation, avoiding UV damage of the optics and having three times higher laser pulse energy if appropriate smoothing is applied (IAEA 2000 Sorrento Fusion Energy Conf., Paper PDP 01). Studies of laser acceleration of electrons in vacuum (Nature 333 (1988) 337) resulted in the explanation of large number 30 MeV electron acceleration and studies for TeV accelerators (Laser and Particle Beams 18 (2000) 135) where the principle of highest possible accuracy for the physics presumptions was established. Studies for laser produced pair production and conditions similar to the Hawking-Unruh radiation in black holes are continued.

¹ University of Western Sydney, Macarthur 2460
² University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052