Historical research guide · 1068 · 2009

The National Ignition Facility: Ushering in a new age for high energy density science

E. I. Moses · R. N. Boyd · B. A. Remington · C. J. Keane · R. Al-Ayat

In one minute

The National Ignition Facility is a laser the size of a sports stadium, built at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to deliver more energy onto a target than any machine before it. Writing in the month the facility was declared complete, Moses — who ran the project — with Boyd, Remington, Keane and Al-Ayat set out what it is for. Two purposes are named first: inertial confinement fusion, which means squeezing a fuel capsule until it burns, and stockpile stewardship. Then comes the list that makes the paper interesting. Temperatures and densities that previously existed only inside stars and giant planets can now be made on a target chamber floor and measured. The authors name x-ray astronomy, laser-plasma interactions, hydrodynamic instabilities, black holes and other accreting objects, how stars evolve and explode, nuclear reactions inside dense plasmas, the warm dense matter of planetary interiors, molecular clouds and star formation — and, at the end of the list, fusion energy generation.

Connection

Chapter 12 needs a machine that can actually put a fuel capsule into the burning regime, and this is the one that did it: the facility described here as newly completed is the facility that reported target gain greater than unity in December 2022. Chapter 9 gets the wider prize the authors are pointing at — a laboratory where the extreme plasma states that the rest of the universe makes for free can be created deliberately, on demand, and photographed.

From the source

The machine exists and it is the largest of its kind. The National Ignition Facility was completed in March 2009 and is the highest energy laser ever constructed.Abstract, first sentence, citing Moses, Journal of Physics Conference Series volume 112, article 012003, 2008
The temperatures and densities the facility reaches are what make it useful, and they are stated as the enabling condition for everything that follows — including the two named mission purposes, inertial confinement fusion and stockpile stewardship.Abstract, second sentence
The same conditions open access to new regimes in laser-plasma interactions and hydrodynamic instabilities — the two processes that decide whether a driven implosion stays symmetric long enough to burn, studied here as physics in their own right rather than only as engineering nuisances.Abstract, second sentence
Astrophysics becomes a laboratory subject. The authors state that experiments at the facility will impact research on black holes and other accreting objects, on the understanding of stellar evolution and explosions, and on molecular cloud dynamics and star formation, with x-ray astronomy named among the fields the new regimes are relevant to.Abstract, second and third sentences
Nuclear reaction rates can be measured in the state matter is actually in inside a star. The paper names nuclear reactions in dense plasmas relevant to stellar nucleosynthesis, and the properties of warm dense matter in planetary interiors, as targets of the experimental programme.Abstract, third sentence
Fusion energy generation is on the authors’ own list of what these experiments will impact — the facility built for weapons-physics stewardship is presented, in the same breath, as the machine on which the energy case will be settled.Abstract, third sentence, closing item

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3116505

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. The article is Physics of Plasmas volume 16, issue 4, article 041006, thirteen pages, published 15 April 2009 by the American Institute of Physics, and it is closed at the publisher. Checked on 2026-09-08: OpenAlex records it closed with no repository copy; Crossref registers no licence for it; the publisher’s article page did not answer automated retrieval within the time allowed. A Lawrence Livermore preprint was searched for at the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information, by title and by author across 2008 to 2010, and none carrying full text was found — OSTI’s record for this article, number 21276970, is a bibliographic record with a citation link only and no LLNL-JRNL report number attached. Because no Livermore release statement could be read, the work is NOT treated as a public-domain United States Government document, and nothing beyond its own abstract is reproduced here. WHAT WAS READ. The abstract below, which the publisher deposited with Crossref and which OSTI holds word-for-word as the description of record 21276970; the two copies were compared and match. Every claim locator below points into that abstract or to the article’s title and front matter, never into the body of the paper. THE ABSTRACT’S OWN INTERNAL CITATION is kept exactly as the authors wrote it, pointing to Moses, Journal of Physics Conference Series volume 112, article 012003, 2008, and to the facility’s own site. AUTHORS AS PRINTED. The journal prints initials rather than full given names, and they are left as printed rather than expanded from memory; all five are given at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California. The OSTI record glues that affiliation onto the fifth author’s name, which is a defect of that record and is not reproduced here. LATER HISTORY, for the reader’s orientation and not as a claim of this paper: the facility reported exceeding the Lawson criterion for ignition in 2021 and target gain greater than unity on 5 December 2022, both published in Physical Review Letters.

How to cite it

E. I. Moses, R. N. Boyd, B. A. Remington, C. J. Keane, R. Al-Ayat (2009) The National Ignition Facility: Ushering in a new age for high energy density science doi:10.1063/1.3116505

In one minute

From the source

The way in

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Where it sits in the curriculum