Lawson criterion for ignition exceeded in an inertial fusion experiment

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin "burn propagation" into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While "scientific breakeven" (i.e., unity target gain) has not yet been achieved (here target gain is 0.72, 1.37 MJ of fusion for 1.92 MJ of laser energy), this Letter reports the first controlled fusion experiment, using laser indirect drive, on the National Ignition Facility to produce capsule gain (here 5.8) and reach ignition by nine different formulations of the Lawson criterion

. Rearrangements of Water Dimer and Hexamer

Abstract. Rearrangement mechanisms of the water dimer and the cage form of the water hexamer are examined theoretically with particular reference to tunneling splittings and spectroscopy. The three lowest barrier rearrangements of the water dimer are characterized by ab initio methods and compared with the results of previous constrained calculations. The acceptor-tunneling pathway does not proceed via a direct rotation around the C2 axis of the acceptor, but rather via relatively asynchronous rotation of the donor about the hydrogen bond and an associated ‘wag’ of the acceptor. Rearrangements between different cage isomers of the water hexamer are studied for two empirical potentials. The experimentally observed triplet splittings may be the result of flip and bifurcation rearrangements of the two single-donor, single-acceptor monomers. Twodimensional quantum calculations of the nuclear dynamics suggest that delocalization over more than one cage isomer may occur, especially in excited states

The GAMESS-UK electronic structure package: algorithms, developments and applications.

NoA description of the ab initio quantum chemistry package GAMESS-UK is presented. The package offers a wide range of quantum mechanical wavefunctions, capable of treating systems ranging from closed-shell molecules through to the species involved in complex reaction mechanisms. The availability of a wide variety of correlation methods provides the necessary functionality to tackle a number of chemically important tasks, ranging from geometry optimization and transition-state location to the treatment of solvation effects and the prediction of excited state spectra. With the availability of relativistic ECPs and the development of ZORA, such calculations may be performed on the entire Periodic Table, including the lanthanides. Emphasis is given to the DFT module, which has been extensively developed in recent years, and a number of other, novel features of the program. The parallelization strategy used in the program is outlined, and detailed speedup results are given. Applications of the code in the areas of enzyme and zeolite catalysis and in spectroscopy are described