Recent Inertial Fusion Research at Osaka

Recent inertial fusion experiments on the direct drive targets have attained the high neutron yield 10¹³ and the high density compression 600 times liquid density respectively. The electron degeneracy of core plasma was also observed. For the indirect drive target experiments, the radiation confinement was measured to keep the illumination uniformity. The ablation pressure of 100M bar is generated by soft X-ray radiation of 3 × 10¹⁴ W/cm² over 1 nsec which produces the implosion velocity of 3 × 10⁷ cm/sec. The development of the reactor driver of a few M joule is the most important issue for the inertial fusion energy program.