Laser-enhanced fusion burn fractions for advanced fuels

Abstract

Calculations for the burn fraction in a laser-created plasma are presented, taking fuel depletion into account. The enhancement from a strong-field laser is analyzed and calculated in the Floquet-Volkoff framework, which was verified to provide an adequate theoretical prediction for laser-enhanced fusion cross sections in a previous work [Phys. Rev. C 109, 044605 (2024)]. Three different fuels were considered for the fusion process, namely deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion, deuterium-helium fusion, and proton-boron fusion. Their laser-enhanced burn fractions are compared in idealistic and realistic settings, where both thermal and nonthermal distributions are considered. It is found that DT fusion gains the least relative enhancement to the burn fraction in all scenarios considered, and that the remaining fuels do not gain an absolute enhancement large enough to be appreciable in comparison with the former.