![]() This heats the fuel, and can potentially cause that fuel to undergo fusion as well. The fusion reactions release high-energy particles, some of which (primarily alpha particles) collide with the remaining high-density fuel around it and slow down. If the temperature and density of that small spot can be raised high enough, fusion reactions in a small portion of the fuel will occur. When it reaches the center of the fuel and meets the shock from the other side of the target, the energy in the shock wave further heats and compresses the tiny volume around it. The rapid blowoff also creates a shock wave that travels towards the center of the compressed fuel. The remaining portion of the target is driven inwards due to Newton's Third Law, eventually collapsing into a small point of very high density. The heat of the driving laser burns the surface of the pellet into a plasma, which explodes off the surface. The target is a small spherical pellet containing a few milligrams of fusion fuel, typically a mix of deuterium and tritium. Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) devices use drivers to rapidly heat the outer layers of a target in order to compress it. Nova also generated considerable amounts of data on high-density matter physics, regardless of the lack of ignition, which is useful both in fusion power and nuclear weapons research. Although Nova failed in this goal, the data it generated clearly defined the problem as being mostly a result of Rayleigh–Taylor instability, leading to the design of the National Ignition Facility, Nova's successor. Nova was the first ICF experiment built with the intention of reaching "ignition", a chain reaction of nuclear fusion that releases a large amount of energy. Nova was a high-power laser built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, United States, in 1984 which conducted advanced inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments until its dismantling in 1999. ![]() The blue boxes contain the amplifiers and their flashtube "pumps", the tubes between the banks of amplifiers are the spatial filters. High-power laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory View down Nova's laser bay between two banks of beamlines. ![]()
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