Recent progress in inertial confinement fusion in the United States

Significant progress has been made in the United States Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Program since the IFSA conferences in Bordeaux (1999) and Kyoto (2001). This progress has covered all areas of ICF from target design to implosion experiments. It is capped by experimental results from cryogenic direct-drive targets on OMEGA and new results from the first quad of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This paper will briefly highlight some of the new results that give increasing confidence in the achievement of ignition in the NIF. (author)