What Can Inertial Confinement Do for Materials Science?

Speaker: Dr. Yun Kai
Affiliation: Cambridge Heavy Industries
Date: November 06, 2026

Abstract:

Controlled fusion has been one of humanity’s long-standing dreams, promising the abundance agenda. But fusion energy remains a longer-term goal. This raises a more immediate question: what can the technologies developed for inertial confinement fusion do for us today? In this talk, I will begin with our development of compact laser-shock instruments for studying and processing materials under extreme conditions. These platforms have been used for applications ranging from shock-induced melting and metamaterial characterization to the dynamic toughening of borosilicate glass. In the latter case, we found the surprising result that glass can become more resistant to fracture as the applied stress increases. Above a critical stress, structural rearrangements of the amorphous network suppress fracture and allow the material to withstand tensile stresses as high as 11 GPa. I will then discuss how we have scaled this concept toward the pressure regime relevant to high-energy-density physics and inertial confinement. In our recent work, we use multiple concentric laser rings, launched with carefully chosen diameters and time delays, to repeatedly reinforce the same converging shock wave. This combination of additive excitation and geometric focusing provides a scalable route to much higher pressures than conventional single-pulse excitation. Experiments combined with hydrocode modeling indicate that megabar pressures can be generated on a benchtop using only tens of millijoules of laser energy; the modeled pressure exceeds 400 GPa near the shock focus. Finally, I will discuss how higher-performance versions of these inertial-confinement devices could evolve from extreme-pressure materials tools into compact sources of energetic particles and neutrons. Such systems may enable new approaches to materials irradiation, neutron imaging, radiation-effects testing, radioisotope production, and other applications well before fusion electricity reaches the grid