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National Ignition Facility physicists are reporting their results formally

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Bilel Rais
University of Padova
Submitted by Bilel Rais on 13 February 2014

Although I have a 'preference' in Fusion for magnetically confined plasmas rather than the Inertially confined path, I keep a great interest in ICF (another pet for Inertially Confined Fusion).

Today while waking up at around 6:30am (I do not usually wake up this early) and while reviewing my favourite online RSS, I learned about quite an interesting publication that had just been published online in peer-reviewed journals. NIFS (U.S. National Ignition Facility) goes formal with the last findings obtained last October (see also the report by FuseNet around that time) with regards to the fuel gain in a hohlraum (a capsule holding the fuel).

In two separate papers published in Physical Review Letters and Nature the findings become official after the first announcement of the great (although relatively small) achievement. After long years of dissapointments at NIFS, I believe this step ahead is important for the future of ICF.