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On December 5th, 2022, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) performed the first experiment demonstrating controlled fusion ignition in the laboratory. With 2.05MJ of UV laser drive energy delivered to the target, a fusion yield of 3.15MJ was achieved, providing a net target gain of 1.5x. The results of this experiment will be discussed, along with the decades-long developments in optical materials, laser architectures, target fabrication, and target diagnostics enabling this historical accomplishment. As a spin-off of this decades long development, an enduring partnership between the laser driven fusion and semiconductor community was formed to explore the possibility of laser driven light sources for EUV lithography, culminating in the establishment of the Virtual National Laboratory (VNL) by Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories as part of a public-private consortium consisting of VNL and multiple semiconductor companies such as Intel and AMD, led by EUV, LLC [1]. The partnership had the purpose of establishing the foundational technologies and integrated pilot systems needed to demonstrate the feasibility of laser driven EUV lithography. The work done by the consortium more than 20 years ago successfully formed the basis of the tools used today for the most advanced semiconductors. This talk will review the ignition breakthrough as well as the historical context and collaboration between our communities for EUV lithography. We will also discuss the next steps for NIF and provide an outlook on future applications and opportunities for continued partnership between our communities to develop transformational technologies, including technologies needed for the reinvigorated pursuit of Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) and for next generation laser driven light sources for semiconductor fabrication.
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
[1] S. Wurm, “The EUV LLC: An Historical Perspective”, Chapter 2 in EUV Lithography, 2nd Edition, V. Bakshi, Ed., SPIE Press, 2018. [https://doi.org/10.1117/3.2305675.ch2]
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