Scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the P. N. Lebedev Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have created a small superintense neutron source that is comparable in efficiency to a huge particle accelerator. Such an installation can fit into a room, and the development itself is much cheaper to build and operate. This writes the resource “Techkult”.
Neutron sources are in great demand in various studies, but their capabilities are no longer sufficient for new experiments. Russian specialists want to solve this problem. They took a 1015 W PHELIX high-energy laser and aimed it at a polymer foam target. The first laser pulse lasts 1 nanosecond, it creates ionization of the target atoms for the plasma cloud. The second pulse, 1 picosecond long, accelerates the electrons in the plasma, transferring hundreds of megaelectronvolts of energy to them.
With the help of a thin plate of gold, it is possible to slow down electrons and turn their energy into gamma quanta – a kind of photons with a small wavelength (about ten thousandth of a nanometer). The result is a stream of gamma radiation, in which trillions of charged gamma quanta fly in a given direction. Having reached the tantalum foil, they are absorbed by the metal nuclei, and in the process of the photonuclear reaction, the formation of neutrons occurs. Up to 60 billion neutrons are created in one pass, and the efficiency of laser energy reaches 0.05%.
During the experiments, scientists set a record for the efficiency of converting laser energy into gamma rays with energies above 10 MeV. This is somewhere around 1.4%.
Source: Trash Box
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