It will be great news when the NIF is finally ready to fire up its 192 laser beams. The operation of the National Ignition Facility is soon to begin after the last of its optical components are installed and adjusted which will used for directing the intensely brilliant light from its 192 super high power lasers onto tiny pellets full of nuclear fusionable fuel.

This bad boy will heat tiny fusion fuel filled targets to temperatures on the rough order of 100 million K. Thus, the first manmade miniature sun in a physical laboratory in a non-destructive manner with respect to the building and laboratory equipment used to produce it will be made although the burst of energy will last on the order of pico seconds or trillionths of a second.

The highly controlled state of the art measurement apparatus and precisely controlled conditions will enable the study of the fusion of small but macroscopic quantities of fusion fuels with far greater precision than has been carried out previously.

The beautiful thing about this new facility is, among other things, the possibility that the study of the miniature explosions might result in the discovery of some new and fundamental physics at the level of the strong nuclear force and quantum-chromo-dynamics or QCD.

Also, since the weak force and the electromagnetic force are theoretically coupled to the strong nuclear force; because of the relatively large numbers of particles that will undergo transmutative operations in each NIF blast compared to the number of particles that will collide at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN when it starts up again this year, as well that which occurs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the Tevatron at Fermilab, and the to be completed Rare Isotope Collider facility within the U.S., on a pulse per pulse basis, the much higher numbers of observable interaction events among the reacting particles in each NIF blast might lead to novel discoveries on the scale of nuclear matter that might have or may go un-noticed at the much higher energy levels produced in high energy particle accelerators.

The window of observation afforded by the NIF pulses’ thermal energy and pressure levels might be appropriate to unlock physical mechanisms that have gone unobserved at the high energy accelerators, perhaps due to QCD resonant frequencies that are particular to high pressure macroscopic nuclear plasma at temperatures of only one hundred million to a few hundred million K. Also, the extreme collision energies within high end particle accelerators produce effective equivalent temperatures on the order of 100 trillion K to over 1,000 trillion K thus perhaps obscuring any novel lower energy phenomenon that might occur at nuclear fusion temperatures for high density, high pressure macroscopic quantities of fusion fuel.

The excitation of nuclear isomeric states might somehow be observed for nuclei for which such has never been observed and/or never been predicted. The results of the discovery of such such isomers, in cases where they are stable or metastable might permit novel methods of storing vast quantities of energy within the nuclei, and perhaps just by chance , also within the individual hadrons or nucleons that make up atomic nuclei. The benefits of any such stable super high mass specific energy storage densities are very wide ranging from perhaps military technology, and more importantly, for peaceful applications such as for general energy storage for industrial processes on Earth, as well as for compact energy sources for powering deep space probes and deep space manned missions.

I can imagine that other fuels besides deuterium-tritium mixtures can be made to fuse at the NIF thus broadening the scope of research at this facility.

It was once said that mankind has harnessed a fundamental cosmic energy source when we first detonated a hydrogen bomb. The NIF will permit very sub-scale simulation based imperical models of exploding nuclear weapons to be tested on a much smaller and safer scale than as has been done during the several decades in the 20th century in which atmospheric tests, underground tests, and underwater tests of nuclear weapons prototypes were undertaken.

The knowledge gained through the NIF will be invaluable for controlled nuclear fusion research with potential future applications ranging from commercial electrical power generation on Earth to uses of nuclear fusion to power deep space manned missions, and the powering of space based habitats or future habitats on other planetary bodies within our solar system.

The use of various mixtures of fusion fuels in the tiny targets that will be blasted by these 192 laser beams can be used to simulate supernova explosions thus offering away to compare or couple: our theoretical knowledge of supernova; our numerical simulations of supernova involving finite analysis codes, computational fluid dynamics codes, and computational plasma hydrodynamic codes; our observational knowledge of supernova; and results taken directly from the laboratory here on Earth.

Supernova shock wave fronts, pressure gradients, temperature gradients, and the like can all be simulated to one extent or another with the NIF pulses.

I say let’s lite this candle and see what we can discover. The physics we discover and its applications I am sure will be much fun, not only for us physics and engineering geeks, but also for the general public whose minds are primed to expect the exotic, and unexpected, having been born in an era of the culture of rapid technology growth while bathed in the popular culture of science fiction.