As we learn from Jeff Hecht’s World News story in the August, 2013 issue of Laser Focus World (INERTIAL-CONFINEMENT FUSION: 2014 laser fusion budgets: Rochester going up, Livermore down), while the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has lost $50 million from its 2014 budget (due directly to sequesters, but indirectly to NIF’s failure to acheive laser-driven fusion "ignition"), the OMEGA laser at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE; Rochester, NY) is getting a 10% boost to $66 million or so.
Hecht notes that the NIF cuts will affect physicists studying high-energy-density (HED) laboratory plasmas; however, he notes that "Although Livermore encourages science on NIF, few outside researchers have been given time on it." The result is, that for many HED researchers, LLE’s OMEGA laser is the “go to” laser.
One example of the study of HED physics at LLE is the compression of iron to a pressure of 560 GPa (5.6 Mbar)—greater than the pressure at the center of the Earth—by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL; Livermore, CA), whose results will help in the study of the cores of terrestrial planets, as well as exoplanets. In the experiment, the OMEGA laser helped give an iron sample a series of shocks that greatly compressed the iron while, amazingly, keeping it below its melting point.
So, while I wish all the best for NIF and, especially, its contribution to the U.S. stockpile stewardship program (in which NIF experiments help in determining the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without the need for doing nuclear tests), I applaud OMEGA for its availability for research, as well as the long history of laser and inertial-confinement-fusion research at the LLE (since 1965, in fact).
