The HiLASE Centre, together with the neighbouring ELI Beamlines Facility, achieved a new success. In a world-first experiment published in the Communications Physics journal a 10GW tabletop laser (PERLA B) was used to generate a continuous source of alfa particles from proton-boron fusion.
The experiment used proton-boron fusion in CN-BN targets to obtain high-energy alpha particle beams (up to 5 MeV) using a very compact approach and a tabletop laser system with a peak power of ~10 GW, which can operate at high-repetition rate (up to 1 kHz). The secondary resonance in the cross section of proton boron fusion (~150 keV in the centre-of-mass frame) is exploited using a laser-based approach.
Thanks to these results, the PERLA B laser system could find use in a variety of areas, ranging from controlled nuclear fusion to radiobiology and cancer therapy.
The team of authors and co-authors included HiLASIANS Yoann Levy, Jaroslav Huynh, Martin Cimrman, Antonio Lucianetti and Tomas Mocek, as well as Valeriia Istokskaia, Marco Tosca, Lorenzo Giuffrida, Jan Psikal, Filip Grepl, Vasiliki Kantarelou, Stanislav Stancek, Arsenios Hadjikyriacou, Daniele Margarone from the ELI Beamlines Facility, The Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC.
