LLE Review, Volume 97 11 In inertial confinement fusion1 (ICF), a spherical shell is irradiated either directly by a large number of overlapping laser beams (direct drive) or by x rays produced in a high-Z “hohlraum” (indirect drive).2 During the laser-driven acceleration phase of an implosion, the target compresses while it converges to the center, then decelerates to peak compression as the c...

Context. Nuclear reaction rates of astrophysical applications are traditionally determined on the basis of HauserFeshbach reaction codes. These codes adopt a number of approximations that have never been tested, such as a simplified width fluctuation correction, the neglect of delayed or multiple-particle emission during the electromagnetic decay cascade, or the absence of the pre-equilibrium c...

The feasibility of using antihydrogen for igniting inertial confinement fusion pellets or triggering large-scale thermonuclear explosions is investigated. The number of antiproton annihilations required to start a thermonuclear burn wave in either DT or Li2DT is found to be about 10/κ, where κ is the compression factor of the fuel to be ignited. In the second part, the technologies for producin...

We analyse archival Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) proportional counter array (PCA) data of thermonuclear X-ray bursts from the 2002 outburst of the accreting millisecond pulsar SAX J1808.4–3658. We present evidence of nonmonotonic variations of oscillation frequency during burst rise, and correlations among the time evolution of the oscillation frequency, amplitude, and the inferred burnin...

The feasibility of using antihydrogen for igniting inertial confinement fusion pellets or triggering large scale thermonuclear explosions is investigated. The number of antiproton annihilations required to start a thermonuclear burn wave in either DT or Li2DT is found to be about 10/k, where k is the compression factor of the fuel to be ignited. In the second part, the technologies for producin...