2023 Nature Ten People Out: Laser Fusion Ignition Female Scientists On The List!

Today, the international top scientific journal "Nature" (Nature) announced the 2023 annual list of top ten scientific figures (Nature's 10) - this list is designed to select 10 in this year all the major scientific events have a place in the characters, its authority and These tasks have led to a series of amazing discoveries and advances.
In addition to the headline-grabbing news that ChatGPT has been selected as one of Nature's Top 10 People of the Year, it's worth noting that a female scientist with a strong connection to the laser industry has also made the list. She is - laser fusion "ignition" - Annie Kritcher (Annie Kritcher).
Annie Kritcher, a physicist and chief designer of the US National Ignition Facility, says that fusion is not a question of "if", but "when". She hopes lasers will play a role: "I'd love to be involved."
The central reason given to Annie Kritcher in Nature's 10 list is that the physicist helped NIF produce nuclear reactions once seen only in hydrogen bombs and stars. "This physicist helped realize the first energy gain."
Here's more about her from Nature's list:
Physicist Annie Kritcher enters the year 2023 with a surge of optimism.
A few weeks ago, she helped the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieve a goal that labs around the world have been failing to reach for decades: press atoms together so tightly that they undergo nuclear fusion, producing more energy than the reaction consumes.
However, after reaching this experimental milestone, known as "ignition," the pressure was on to do it again.
The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was originally designed to strengthen nuclear weapons science. Its progress could also help develop nuclear fusion into a safe, clean, and virtually limitless source of energy, and the NIF's successful experiments last year took many by surprise. The "ignition" experiment was a decade behind schedule, and some began to worry that the goal was simply out of reach. As the lead designer of the main fusion experiment, Kritcher and her team immediately set out to prove that NIF could reliably achieve ignition.
High-stakes research is often hard to do without ups and downs: the team made its first repeat attempt in June, with poor results. "It can get crazy and I get stressed out." Kritcher said.
Well, on the next attempt they succeeded.On July 30, the facility's 192-beam laser delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to frozen particles of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium suspended in a gold cylinder. The resulting implosion caused the isotopes to release energy as they fused into helium, producing temperatures six times hotter than the sun's core. These reactions produced a record 3.88 megajoules of fusion energy.
Other facilities are needed to produce enough fusion energy over a longer period of time, most notably tokamak reactors, which use powerful magnetic fields to confine fusion reactions. This technology was developed by the $22 billion ITER project, an international collaboration. However, until NIF's achievement, no laboratory had ever produced a fusion reaction with a capacity that exceeded its consumption (i.e., a "net gain").
Kritcher and her team followed up their success in July with two more ignition attempts in October, succeeding in four out of six attempts. They are preparing for higher "net gain" capacity next year. In the process, NIF scientists have opened the door to research and helped fuel a wave of optimism about the future of fusion energy.
NIF is designed to help government scientists ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal without the need for test explosions, but that's not what initially drew Kritcher to the lab. she began researching fusion energy during a summer internship at Livermore in 2004, and quickly set her sights on NIF as one of the few places on earth where fusion reactions are being studied, before she began her graduate studies. one of the few places on the planet to study fusion reactions.
She joined NIF in 2012 and became the lead designer in 2016. Since then, she has led a team that analyzes experimental data and uses computer models to design experiments aimed at achieving and increasing fusion yields by adjusting parameters such as the size and configuration of targets and the energy and timing of various laser beams. Once her team completes the design, the lab's experimental team takes over firing the lasers and collecting data.
Roger Falcone, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, says, "Anne is an excellent student who devotes herself to her work." He began working with Kritcher when she was a graduate student and continued through her early work at NIF. During that time, he said, she demonstrated her prowess in designing laser experiments designed to test how materials behave when compressed to extreme temperatures and pressures.
Those skills put Kritcher at the heart of the fusion program in 2016. At the time, energy yields from fusion experiments had stagnated, and NIF Chief Scientist Omar Hurricane wanted to blaze a new trail. And Kritcher stepped forward with ideas that Hurricane says, "She was all in." From there, she became one of the lead designers for NIF.
Kritcher and her team spent the next few years analyzing data and making design adjustments to the results of NIF's major experiments. In addition to making various changes to the target, they were able to utilize the improvements to increase the overall laser energy available. As a result, they successfully achieved fusion with increasing regularity.
With a formal ignition target in place, Kritcher began working on a new series of experiments aimed at increasing the yield again by feeding more laser energy into a thicker target capsule. This could represent another step forward in NIF's goal of achieving yields in the tens of terajoules and beyond.
In the long run, she believes that with some upgrades, the facility will be able to meet its goals and increase yields by an order of magnitude, which will allow scientists to begin working on a prototype laser fusion energy reactor. It's not a question of "if" fusion energy will come, she said, but "when," and she hopes the laser will work.
"I think it's a great possibility," she said, "and I'd love to be involved."