The Antares Facility for Inertial Fusion Experiments — Status and Plans

Abstract

In the last decade several increasingly powerful short pulse CO₂ lasers have been constructed at Los Alamos National Laboratory to investigate the feasibility of CO₂ as an inertial fusion driver. The advantage of CO₂, a gas laser with high rep-rate capability, electrical efficiency as high as 10%, and scalability to large energies, must outweigh important difficulties in target physics due to the copious production of suprathermal electrons if CO₂ is to be considered a viable driver option.