MATLAB for Control of Cryogenic DT Fuel for Nuclear Fusion Ignition Experiments

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) houses the world’s most energetic laser that can deliver over 2 MJ of energy at the 500 TW level of power of 351 nm UV light. This immense optical energy is focused on a small target that can create such high energy densities that the unique physics underlying this extreme regime can be explored. One of the primary goals of the NIF is to explore controlled nuclear fusion where the energy from the laser is used to compress hydrogen (more specifically, its isotopes deuterium and tritium or DT) to 100 billion atmospheres where temperatures reach 100 million Kelvin, and at which point the atoms can overcome Coulombic repulsion and fuse. This grand challenge of ignition where the nuclear fusion energy out was greater than the optical energy in was successfully achieved in December 2022 in a landmark experiment. This is expected to usher in a new age of nuclear fusion research with diverse and far-reaching goals. One of the many challenges of this experiment was the formation of a spherical DT ice layer at ~19 K with very high dimensional precision and smoothness. In this presentation, see a brief overview of the key aspects of the complex and multifaceted system needed to carry out these experiments and a detailed explanation of the use of MATLAB^® for the formation of the DT ice layer for the ignition experiment—as well as previous experiments that explored the physics needed to achieve that. In particular, the image analysis tools in MATLAB were used to control the ice layering process. This use case serves as a good example of the wide-ranging applications of this software tool.