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ANNOUNCEMENTS

The 9th edition of the summer school Plasmas in Super-Intense Laser Fields will take place in Erice, Sicily, Italy, on July 1 – 11, 2022. We will provide more information on this webpage in due time. Find the first announcement at this link.

PURPOSE OF THE COURSE

Laser-produced plasmas represent a rapidly evolving field of science, which in recent years has brought to new important discoveries, as well as to the search for the demonstration of nuclear fusion in the laboratory. The experimental results recently obtained at NIF (1.3 MJ of fusion energy after irradiation of a deuterium-tritium target with 1.9 MJ of laser energy) for the first time in history bring us close to break-even and open real perspective for achieving gain and for future energy production by nuclear fusion. Also, the advent of laser systems capable of delivering very short pulses and very high intensities has made accessible new regimes to experimental investigations and has opened new horizons in the interaction of laser fields with atoms, solids and plasmas. In these extreme conditions, electrons are accelerated at velocities close to the velocity of light, so that strongly non-linear and relativistic interactions take place. A large variety of applications has arisen, from novel light and X-ray sources, to new particle acceleration techniques, with possible applications to physics and medicine. High-energy laser systems, like NIF in the US and now LMJ/PETAL in France, offer the possibility of investigating exotic states of matter, astrophysics in the laboratory and, of course, the physics of inertial fusion in particular through advanced ignition schemes (fast ignition and shock ignition).

The course will cover areas of interest to the scientific community working on laser-produced plasmas, laser-driven sources of particles and radiation physics of inertial confinement fusion. The course is supported by the EUROfusion Enabling Research Project: ENR-IFE.01.CEA “Advancing shock ignition for direct-drive inertial fusion”, funded by the European Union via the Euratom Research and Training Programme (Grant Agreement No 101052200 — EUROfusion).

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