A main focus of work towards nuclear fusion reactors is inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which uses powerful energy beams, such as lasers, to compress and heat hydrogen fuel to fusion temperatures, and uses the inertia of the fuel itself to confine it long enough for fusion to occur. A modification of the fast igniter approach to ICF, reported this week, could be a significant advance towards efficient laser fusion ignition. The new system makes use of ultra-intense laser light with a novel compression geometry to achieve a laser driven implosion with picosecond fast heating by a laser pulse timed to coincide with peak compression.
http://www.nature.com/nature/links/010823/010823-4.html
