title: Hole boring in a DT Pellet and Fast-Ion Ignition with Ultraintense Laser Pulses.
abstract: Recently achieved high intensities of short laser pulses open new prospects in their application to hole boring in inhomogeneous overdense plasmas and for ignition in precompressed DT fusion targets. A simple analytical model and numerical simulations demonstrate that pulses with intensities exceeding 10;{22} W/cm;{2} may penetrate deeply into the plasma as a result of efficient ponderomotive acceleration of ions in the forward direction. The penetration depth as big as hundreds of microns depends on the laser fluence, which has to exceed a few tens of GJ/cm;{2}. The fast ions, accelerated at the bottom of the channel with an efficiency of more than 20%, show a high directionality and may heat the precompressed target core to fusion conditions.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Optique Appliquée, ENSTA, Ecole Polytechnique, CNRS, 91761 Palaiseau, France.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Naumova
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Schlegel
authors.forename: V T
authors.initials: VT
authors.lastname: Tikhonchuk
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Labaune
authors.forename: I V
authors.initials: IV
authors.lastname: Sokolov
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Mourou