Physics and technology of Inertial Fusion Energy

3 nov 2025, 08:30 → 7 nov 2025, 18:30 Europe/Rome

In the frame of the  Erasmus+ KA2-HED project "LaserFusion: Innovative Education & Training in Laser Inertial Fusion Energy" this 5-day bootcamp will consist in a training course for PhD students with focus on diagnostics for Inertial Fusion Energy experiments. It will include lectures and seminars on theoretical aspects and practical schemes of plasma, particle and radiation diagnostics, as well as hands-on exercise in laboratory.

Follow on line:   https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/3608000401610?p=1zlhpbxVZHqRIyw5wO

 

Find out also the other schools that will be organized in the frame of the  Erasmus+ KA2-HED project "LaserFusion: Innovative Education & Training in Laser Inertial Fusion Energy" by visiting the LaserFusion website

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prepare_Your_Laptop.zip

lunedì 3 novembre

16:00 → 16:30 Registration and Welcome

16:30 → 17:30 Evaluation Test

17:30 → 18:30 break: Welcome buffet

martedì 4 novembre

08:30 → 13:30 Lectures and Seminars

talk-ERASMUS-ICF-macchi.pdf

08:30 Laser Plasma Interaction

Speaker: Martina Salvadori (CNR)

LaserPlasmaInteraction_Salvadori_Upload.pdf

10:00 Laser diagnostics

Speaker: LUCAUMBERTO LABATE (CNR - Istituto Nazionale di Ottica)

SCHOOL_20251104_ERASMUSp_LaserDiagnostics.pdf

11:30 Break

12:00 Seminar: Magnetic spectrometer

The use of a pair of magnets to deflect electrons with respect to their energy will be presented. Different setups from IPPL laboratory as well as from the bibliography will be presented. The use of different detectors for online and accumulative signal acquisition will be discussed (scintillating screens and IPs).

Speaker: Dr. Georgia Adrianaki

12:45 Seminar: Shock diagnostics

The optical and X-ray diagnostics used to study laser-driven shock waves—which generate extreme states of matter—are indispensable for characterizing material properties under high pressure and temperature. The Velocity Interferometer System for Any Reflector (VISAR) [1] is the primary optical tool, providing time-resolved, sub-nanosecond precision measurements of the shock velocity of moving surfaces. By tracking the Doppler shift of laser light reflected from the moving surface, VISAR provides a direct, time-resolved measurement of the shock velocity (Us) and particle velocity (Up), which are critical for determining the material's Equation of State (EOS) [2] via the Rankine-Hugoniot relations. Complementing this, Streaked Optical Pyrometry (SOP) measures the thermal emission of the shock wave emitted on the rear side of the target. Assuming a blackbody radiator model, the shock temperature (Ts) is determined from the blackbody radiation emitted by the shocked material. X-ray Phase-Contrast Imaging (XPCI) [3] is a critically important diagnostic for laser-driven shock experiments on foam targets because it overcomes the limitations of standard X-ray radiography by exploiting the difference in the material's refractive index rather than just absorption. Foams, typically made of low-Z materials with numerous voids, have an intricate cellular structure that creates a high concentration of material-void interfaces, making them nearly invisible to absorption-based methods; XPCI, however, is exceptionally sensitive to these rapid density gradients and interfaces. This capability allows us to precisely visualize the unperturbed structure of the foam, track the propagation of the shock wave through the porous medium, and most critically, directly diagnose the development and growth of hydrodynamic instabilities (like the Richtmyer-Meshkov instability, Kelvin-Helmotz, etc.) seeded by the inherent non-uniformity of the foam's cellular network, which is vital for validating models of mixing and compression in high-energy-density physics. Ref. 1. Antonelli, L., Barbato, F., Mancelli, D., et al., X-ray phase-contrast imaging for laser-induced shock waves. Europhysics Letters (2019), 125(3), 35002 2. Mancelli, D., et al., Shock hugoniot data for water up to 5 Mbar obtained with quartz standard at high-energy laser facilities, Laser and Particle Beams (2021), 4141522 3. Peter M. Celliers, Marius Millot; Imaging velocity interferometer system for any reflector (VISAR) diagnostics for high energy density sciences. Rev. Sci. Instrum. 1 January 2023; 94 (1): 011101

Speaker: Dr. Donaldi Mancelli

13:30 → 14:30 Lunch-Break

14:30 → 18:30 Hands-on Session

14:30 Introduction to hands-on experience

Briefly on Laser safety2.pdf

15:30 Hands-on activity

Three parallel activities:
1. Wavefront reconstruction of He-Ne laser, Phase plates: lab measurements + python script
2. OAP alignment with He-Ne laser + Labtour
3. Mounting optics: Wavefront changes due to stress on mirrors

mercoledì 5 novembre

08:30 → 13:30 Lectures and Seminars

talk-ERASMUS-ICF-macchi.pdf

08:30 Parametric Instabilities

Speaker: GABRIELE CRISTOFORETTI

Pisa School_Cristoforetti.pdf

10:00 Laser-accelerated protons for ICF applications

Speaker: Dr. Andrea Macchi

talk-ERASMUS-ICF-macchi.pdf

11:30 Break

12:00 Seminar: Detectors and Diagnostics for Laser-Plasma Interactions

Speaker: Christopher Murphy

Pisa- without Copyrighted Images.pdf

12:45 Seminar: Ion Acceleration

Speaker: Peter Hilz

13:30 → 14:30 Lunch-Break

14:30 → 18:30 Hands-on Session

14:30 Introduction to hands-on experience

15:30 Hands-on experience

Three parallel activities:
1. Wavefront reconstruction of He-Ne laser, Phase plates: lab measurements + python script
2. OAP alignment with He-Ne laser + Labtour
3. Mounting optics: Wavefront changes due to stress on mirrors

giovedì 6 novembre

08:30 → 13:30 Lectures and Seminars

talk-ERASMUS-ICF-macchi.pdf

08:30 X-ray diagnostics

Speaker: PETRAMARIA KOESTER (CNR-INO)

XrayDiagnostics16-9.pdf

10:00 Interferometry

Speaker: Dr. Fernando Brandi

lecture_Brandi.pdf

11:30 Break

12:00 Seminar: Monte Carlo Simulations at a Laser Facility: Diagnostics and Beyond

Monte Carlo techniques use randomness to efficiently solve a broad range of problems across applied mathematics and virtually every branch of science. They are particularly well-suited for tackling high-dimensional problems and for gaining insight into complex stochastic phenomena. In this lecture, we will explore how state-of-the-art Monte Carlo tools can be applied to simulate radiation transport, providing a foundation for developing advanced instrumentation and deepening our understanding of fundamental physical processes in high-power laser facilities. What are the typical use cases of Monte Carlo techniques? How to get started using them? What mistakes to avoid as a beginner?

Speaker: Dr. Benoit Lefebvre

12:45 Seminar: Optimization of direct drive irradiation

To achieve laser driven nuclear fusion, a pellet of hydrogen isotopes is
imploded in reaction to an expanding plasma, ablated by the laser. The
implosion is subject to hydrodynamic instabilities, while laser-plasma
instabilities (LPI) occur in the expanding plasma. These instabilities
are two of the greatest challenges faced when designing suitable
implosions for laser fusion experiments. Each instability can be
evaluated numerically but requires expensive computations that can
become prohibitive on the timescales required by the implosion. A new
methodology employs temporally discretised evaluations and simple
physics based approximations to enable fast and accurate illumination
design of experiments at existing laser facilities [1].

Major breakthroughs in laser fusion experiments have led to significant
public and private funding around the world [2]. Within France, the
Taranis project led by Genf is aiming to create a laser fusion reactor
to produce electrical energy. In order to achieve the necessary
implosion stability, a reactor would require hundreds or thousands of
laser beams, each with carefully selected parameters. The enormous
parameter space and the expense of numerical evaluation is a significant
challenge for design of future facilities.

This talk presents a new methodology for creating and evaluating the
drive configuration of beams for future laser facilities. A
state-of-the-art ray-tracing tool [3] is employed alongside automated
optimization to create novel illumination geometries while considering
the impact of the LPI cross-beam energy transfer, beam spot shapes,
bandwidth and wavelength. This technology is a critical step towards
fusion energy, furthermore it creates opportunity for designing a
greater variety of experiments at current facilities, and evaluating LPI
thought too computationally expensive for prior methods.

References:
[1] Barlow, D. et al. “Optimization Methodology of Polar Direct-Drive
Illumination for the National Ignition Facility” Physical review
letters 133, (2024) 175101.
[2] Abu-Shawareb, H., et al. "Lawson criterion for ignition exceeded in
an inertial fusion experiment." Physical review letters 129.7 (2022):
075001.
[3] Colaïtis, A, et al. "Adaptive inverse ray-tracing for accurate and
efficient modeling of cross beam energy transfer in hydrodynamics
simulations." Physics of Plasmas 26.7 (2019).

Speaker: Dr. Duncan Barlow

13:30 → 14:30 Lunch-Break

14:30 → 18:30 Hands-on Session

14:30 Introduction to hands.on experience

15:30 Hands-on experience

Three parallel activities:
1. Wavefront reconstruction of He-Ne laser, Phase plates: lab measurements + python script
2. OAP alignment with He-Ne laser + Labtour
3. Mounting optics: Wavefront changes due to stress on mirrors

20:00 → 23:00 Social Dinner

venerdì 7 novembre

08:30 → 12:15 Hands-on Session

08:30 Wavefront reconstruction from collected data

In this hands-on session we will reconstruct the laser phase map using fluence measurements previously done. They will feed a written-from-scratch Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm, using classes provided in the "LightPipes" Python package

Speaker: FEDERICO AVELLA (Istituto Nazionale di Ottica - CNR)

ger_sax_complete_nb.zip

group1.zip

group 2.zip

group 3.zip

ietlife_instructions.pdf

12:15 → 13:00 Lectures and Seminars

talk-ERASMUS-ICF-macchi.pdf

12:15 Seminar 7: Shock in a Foam Target

Speaker: Olena Turianska

06.11.2025 final version Pisa Erasmus LaserFusion summer school Olena Turianska;.pptx

13:00 → 14:30 Lunch-Break

14:30 → 15:30 Evaluation Test