By Andrew Grant
A quick-hitting laser pulse has breathed new life into a multibillion-dollar effort to generate substantial amounts of fusion energy.
The 192 laser beams at the $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility have now triggered fusion reactions that briefly sustain themselves. The reactions, reported February 12 in Nature, produced nearly 10 times as much energy as the previous record for laser fusion research. But they still fall well short of recouping the energy supplied by the world’s most powerful laser.