Before ignition, very little science had been explored in the "burning plasma" regime. Now that ignition had been figured out, an entire new field of experimentation has been opened up.

https://www.llnl.gov/news/three-peer-reviewed-papers-highlig...

In particular, the original article talks about magnetic compression hypothesis being a byproduct of white dwarf simulation. With this new regime, they were able to apply the same ideas to fusion, resulting in the breakthrough.

With ignition being a regular thing in laser fusion going forward, I suspect many groups will have some slightly varied approach or some technique improvements.

If you're into fusion and lasers, there's a lot of areas that are still ripe for magnitude leaps.

- Laser power, timing, materials, and cost

- Metallurgy of the target canister

- Construction of the target and perfecting it as you mentioned

- Absorption of energy

I believe the NIF will focus on #2 and #3 as of course they focus more on making the "boom bigger" rather than making it cost effective of useful. IMO another group (startup or otherwise) will step in as an actual project in this space.

One area to innovate here is to use a different fuel mixture that doesn't produce neutrons. We wouldn't need liquid lithium/lead, breeding, or any of the complexities people very commonly complain about.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion

It's entirely within the realm of possibility that the technique to achieve ignition will open the door for 5:1 or 10:1 q with neutron-free fuels.

Even a total Q of 2:1 or 3:1 is a huge win, and that's within a magnitude of the modern tech.

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Something I want to mention here too - the easiest aneutronic fuel mixture available is H2 + He3. It hasn't been explored too much since He3 is hard to come by on earth (though you can mine it from the moon!).

But, Helion has patented a way to generate He3 from H2 fusions. We don't need to mine He3 to achieve neutron-free fuels, just need to transmute it from seawater.

here's a video that shows a machine at Berkeley lab that makes a high-performance magnet wire, not sure if it's related to this project but still pretty interesting to see how complex just the wire is- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmmNRaKpBTI&t=2138s

Ironically vacuum, unless super perfect, is not that good insulator. All hvac techs who started compressor on vacuum (albeit much less perfect) can tell :)

Yea, the whole target bay is in vacuum which helps with the arcing.