It’s one thing to simulate the extreme reactions that occur inside the Sun, which is the goal of fusion researchers from all perspectives. Getting them to generate heat to sustain the reactions and produce clean, boundless energy would be the real holy grail. Recently, researchers took an important step towards this goal by creating a self-heating “burning plasma”, and now a closer examination of this plasma has revealed the strange, unexplained behavior of the ions within it.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) have been working on nuclear fusion since 2009, using an array of 192 lasers to fire high-energy pulses into a ball bearing-sized fuel capsule. This fuel pellet is made up of deuterium and tritium, and destroying it by sudden and intense heating causes individual atoms to turn into helium, releasing a tremendous amount of energy in the process.

In an ideal world for fusion researchers, these fusion reactions would act as a source of heat, turning off the lasers, and these collisions would become a self-sustaining source of energy. In January of this year, scientists at NIF published a study detailing key steps towards that dream by fine-tuning their technique to create a self-sustaining “burning plasma”.

Although burning plasma only existed for nanoseconds, it was a first in this research field and an important advance in the field of fusion research, known as nuclear fusion (ICF). A new analysis of this burning plasma has shown that it behaves unexpectedly, with the ions in it having higher energies than models predicted.

“This means that the fusing ions have more energy than would be expected in the most efficient snapshots, which is unpredictable – or unpredictable – with conventional radiation hydrodynamics codes used to model ICF internal explosions,” said Alastair Moore. article.

Scientists liken the unexpected, high-energy behavior of ions to the Doppler effect; just like when you hear the sound of a police siren as a car approaches, passes by, and then moves away. The team says more advanced simulations are needed to accurately determine current processes, but this could provide important information for further design of fusion plants.

“Understanding the reason for this deviation from hydrodynamic behavior may be important for obtaining reliable and repeatable ignition,” the team writes.