Last year and after about a decade of trying, physicists working at the mammoth National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the US finally succeeded in generating a self-sustaining fusion reaction. But having since struggled to reproduce the feat, they have been busy trying to work out what makes the results of their experiments so variable. Now, a new finding at NIF may provide a clue – ions in what is known as a burning plasma have an unexpected kinetic energy distribution, which encourages fusion.
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