Progress at Light-Speed: Lasers Reach Significant Milestone For Fusion
By Dr. Georg Korn, Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer Marvel Fusion
The quest to make fusion power a reality took a massive step forward today.
The latest news from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory indicates that energy gain by fusion is imminent. This is a massive milestone for the entire fusion community. The current success makes me even more optimistic for fusion than ever.
Lasers are becoming more and more powerful and are finally closing in on the necessary parameters for initiating fusion processes. These high-intensity lasers can be used to concentrate energy in a plasma and create conditions in which fusion reactions occur amply.
While in the latest NIF experiments, the total energy released through fusion reactions is still less than the energy in the laser pulse (about 70 percent) the results illustrate the rapid pace of innovation in today’s fusion landscape. We are closer to our collective goals than ever before.
Moving forward, the next generation of lasers, diode-pumped high repetition rate, will assist us in the urgent process of developing a clean, dense, and efficient technology, which, in turn, help solve the world’s energy crisis through large-scale decarbonized energy production.
For physicists, like myself, the rapid advancement of lasers to that end is nothing short of revolutionary with much more to come.
Much work remains though to overcome the final mile. Marvel Fusion works with ultra- short high-peak power lasers where the energy delivered to targets is even more concentrated. Nanostructured targets lead to highly efficient energy absorption and to the enhancement of fusion rates, further accelerating the path towards commercial fusion even for aneutronic fusion reactions.
Today, we are overcoming another hurdle to turn fusion-based electricity, a clean, safe and limitless way to solve our energy dilemma, into a reality.
Dr. Georg Korn is the Chief Science & Technology Officer at Marvel Fusion. During his long career in science Georg has carried out research on a wide range of topics in laser and laser physics and technology including lasers for ICF fusion, laser-plasma interaction, laser-driven short-pulse x-ray generation, ultrafast and high-power lasers for ultra-intense laser matter and laser-vacuum interaction and lasers for material processing and vision correction.
Throughout his research, Georg has worked with multiple Nobel Prize physicists, including Dr. Nicolay Basov for laser fusion topics, and Prof. Gérard Mourou, the inventor of Chirped-pulse amplification (CPA), a fundamental technology to lead to highly-intense, ultrashort pulse laser systems. Since 2007 he has been the deputy coordinator of ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure), a European high-power laser-facility project, and later became the chief scientist (2011) and the science and technology manager (2014) of the ELI Beamlines in Prague, Czech Republic. Georg Korn is a Fellow of the OSA and visiting professor at Osaka University.
He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the Institute for Optics and Spectroscopy, Academy of Sciences, Berlin. After a postdoc at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he worked at institutions such as the Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (Berlin), the Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences University of Michigan, the University of California, San Diego, the Laboratoire d’Optique Appliquée (Palaiseau, France), the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) as well as in the medical laser industry.
