Collision of high-velocity impactor with high-density plasma as another pathway towards laser fusion ignition

The fast ignition has a potential to have ignition with about one tenth of laser energy required for these programs. However this ``conventional'' fast ignition approach suffers drawback that physics understanding of hot electron generation and transport is insufficient to make quantitative prediction of the ignition. Here we employ a new approach that totally eliminates this complex problem while keeping the advantage of the compactness of the fast ignition; we accelerated a small portion of the fuel to a super-high velocity to collide with a pre-compressed main fuel. We have observed two orders-of-magnitude increase of neutron yield at the right timing of the impact collision, providing another pathway to compact and reliable fusion energy production