In October 2010, in a building the size of three U.S. football fields, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory powered up 192 laser beams, focused their energy into a pulse with the punch of a speeding truck, and fired it at a pellet of nuclear fuel the size of a peppercorn. So began a campaign by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to achieve the goal it is named for: igniting a fusion reaction that produces more energy than the laser puts in. A decade and nearly 3000 shots later, NIF is still generating more fizz than bang. But with new target designs and laser pulse shapes, along with better tools to monitor the miniature explosions, NIF researchers believe they are close to an important intermediate milestone known as "burning plasma": a fusion burn sustained by the heat of the reaction itself rather than the input of laser energy.

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激光聚变反应堆接近“燃烧等离子体”里程碑

2010 年 10 月，在一座有三个美国足球场大小的建筑中，劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室的研究人员启动了 192 束激光束，用高速卡车的冲击将能量聚焦成一个脉冲，然后将其发射到核燃料颗粒上胡椒粒大小。因此，国家点火装置 (NIF) 开始了一项运动，以实现其命名的目标：点燃产生比激光输入更多能量的聚变反应。 十年和近 3000 次发射后，NIF 产生的嘶嘶声仍然超过砰。但是有了新的目标设计和激光脉冲形状，以及更好的监测微型爆炸的工具，NIF 研究人员相信他们已经接近一个重要的中间里程碑，称为“燃烧等离子体”：