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Realizing usable electrical power from nuclear fusion has been a grand challenge for physicists and engineers for more than 70 years. Recently the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has made a major step forward, realizing multi-megajoule energy yield from tiny pellets containing deuterium and tritium compressed by the action of powerful lasers. The next step is to make the compression to a fusion plasma smoother and more robust. Here at SLAC, our free-electron X-ray laser LCLS gives us a unique instrument to visualize the compression process, both dynamically on the pellet materials and chemically at the atomic scale. Our program is leveraging detailed, AI-driven simulations. In this lecture, I will describe our experiments, which operate on ultra-fast timescales and at ultra-high pressures, to smooth the path to commercial fusion energy.
