The rapid development in ultrahigh-intensity lasers has allowed theexploration of applying an auxiliary heating technique in inertial confinementfusion (ICF) research. It is hoped that, compared with the `standard fastignition' scheme, raising the temperature of a hot-spot over the ignitionthreshold based on the shock-heated temperature will greatly reduce therequired output energy of an ignition ultrahigh-intensity pulse. One of the keyissues in ICF auxiliary heating is: how can we transport the exogenous energyefficiently into the hot-spot of compressed DT fuel? A scheme is proposed withthree phases. First, a partial-spherical-shell capsule, such as double-conicaltarget, is imploded as in the conventional approach to inertial fusion toassemble a high-density fuel configuration with a hot-spot of temperaturelower than the ignition threshold. Second, a hole is bored through the shelloutside the hot-spot by suprathermal electron explosion boring. Finally, thefuel is ignited by suprathermal electrons produced in the high-intensityignition laser-plasma interactions. Calculations with a simple hybrid modelshow that the new scheme can possibly lead to ignition and burn propagationwith a total drive energy of a few tens of kilojoules and an output energy aslow as hundreds of joules for a single ignition ultrahigh-intensity pulse.
Advanced-ignition-concept exploration on OMEGA