About the project

Inertial Confinement Fusion's energy gain was first demonstrated at the National Ignition Facility in December 2022. Since then, researchers and engineers have been optimizing the process in preparation of the pilot fusion plant.

In conjunction with General Atomics, SLAC, and the Department of Energy, our goal is to develop the first rep-rated target injection and tracking system which would be instrumental in scaling the ICF process. My work is mainly focused on being able to locate the center of each injected fusion target with an accuracy of ± 20µm as they travel at 100m/s every tenth of a second.

Initial Experiments

This topic had been touched upon once in 2008 by Lane Carlson et al. We began our experiments by using the same "Poisson Spot Tracking" method employed by the researchers in their paper.

We set a 4mm diameter sphere on a 3 axis stage in the path of a 1064nm pulsed laser and captured the diffraction pattern around it on a CCD camera placed at the bottom. We then moved the stage around and tracked the central bright spot of the diffraction pattern (Poisson spot).

Target Tracking for IFE