Bigger is Better: NLO-Boosted Excimer Lasers for Inertial Fusion Energy

Connor Galloway
CEO of Xcimer Energy

The National Ignition Facility achieved scientific breakeven in December 2022. While this was a major accomplishment, many challenges remain in making Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) a reality. In particular, reliable commercial IFE will require a laser system that is much more efficient, lower cost, and higher energy, with superior spatio-temporal control of laser radiation. To accomplish this, Xcimer Energy is combining χ3 nonlinear optical (NLO) gas amplifiers with high-energy excimer amplifiers in a highly flexible architecture that can scale to tens of megajoules of laser energy on-target with an efficiency of 5% to 7% and cost of tens of dollars per joule, and the ability to deliver energy to-target from a very small solid angle (<10e-3 sr). This will provide a practical path to rapidly demonstrate and commercialize IFE by allowing the use of simpler fusion targets that can achieve high gain robustly, and allowing repetition rates for electrical power production of under 1 Hz which relaxes requirements throughout the plant. Furthermore, this laser architecture enables the well-studied HYLIFE reactor concept utilizing thick liquid FLiBe molten salt flows to protect the first structural wall, allowing a 30-year lifetime from existing low-activation steel and eliminating the need to develop and qualify new first-wall materials.

Xcimer Energy has raised funds from leading clean-tech venture firms, and will begin construction of the “Phoenix” prototype laser facility in Denver, Colorado by Q4 2023. Phoenix will be a kilojoule-scale testbed for low-pressure gas NLO (Brillouin and Raman) amplifier development. Xcimer is currently recruiting for scientific and engineering positions including nonlinear optical physics, low density plasma chemistry and kinetics, plasma physics, pulsed-power, ML optimization and control, and laser and fusion engineering.

Host: Gennady Shvets

Join us for a reception before the talk from 3:45 until 4:15 p.m.

About the speaker: Conner Galloway received a B.S. and M.Eng. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT in 2009 and was admitted to the MIT Nuclear Engineering Ph.D. program, receiving a fully sponsored NNSA fellowship. He declined both the fellowship and MIT admission to join an ICF research company, Innoven Energy, in 2009. There he served as Head of Target Design and led development of radiation hydrodynamic codes and target designs for the company, receiving several US patents. He left Innoven in 2016 and spent several years building another startup (AliveCor) in the medical technology space. In 2020, he left AliveCor and began assembling a team and developing the laser fusion approach of Xcimer Energy, which he co-founded in January 2022. Conner currently serves as the CEO of Xcimer Energy. Since founding, Xcimer has raised over $12M in seed funding and received a $9M award from DOE’s fusion Milestone program—the second largest award of the program.