Starting in 1947, two UK teams carried out experiments based on this concept. This was the first detailed examination of the Z-pinch concept. The inventors were Sir George Paget Thomson and Moses Blackman. The first patent related to a fusion reactor was registered in 1946 by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. In 1938, Peter Thonemann developed a detailed plan for a pinch device, but was told to do other work for his thesis. For this work, Bethe won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. The deuterium would then fuse through other reactions to further increase the energy output. The experiment involved the acceleration of protons towards a target at energies of up to 600,000 electron volts.Ī theory verified by Hans Bethe in 1939 showed that beta decay and quantum tunneling in the Sun's core might convert one of the protons into a neutron and thereby produce deuterium rather than a diproton. Neutrons from fusion were first detected in 1933. Working with Rutherford and others, Mark Oliphant discovered the nuclei of Helium-3 ( helions) and tritium ( tritons), the first case of human-caused fusion. The accelerator was then used to fire deuterons at various targets. In 1932, Walton produced the first man-made fission by using protons from the accelerator to split lithium into alpha particles. Nuclear experiments began using a particle accelerator built by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at Ernest Rutherfords' Cavendish Laboratory at University of Cambridge. They showed that fusion can occur at lower energies than previously believed, backing Eddington's calculations. In 1929 Atkinson and Houtermans provided the first estimates of the stellar fusion rate. George Gamow introduced the mathematical basis for quantum tunnelling in 1928. This became a matter of debate because the value is much higher than astronomical observations that suggested about one-third to one-half that value. Eddington used this to calculate that the core would have to be about 40 million K. Henry Norris Russell observed that the relationship in the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram suggested that a star's heat came from a hot core rather than from the entire star. Quantum tunneling was discovered by Friedrich Hund in 1929, and shortly afterwards Robert Atkinson and Fritz Houtermans used the measured masses of light elements to show that large amounts of energy could be released by fusing small nuclei. Throughout the 1920s, Arthur Stanley Eddington became a major proponent of the proton–proton chain reaction (PP reaction) as the primary system running the Sun. This provided the first hints of a mechanism by which stars could produce energy. In 1920 British physicist Francis William Aston discovered that the mass equivalent of four hydrogen atoms is heavier than the mass of one helium atom ( He-4), which implied that net energy can be released by combining hydrogen atoms to form helium. This flow chart above groups the approaches into color coded families, these are: the Pinch Family (orange), The Mirror Family (red), Cusp Systems (violet), Tokamaks & Stellarators (Green), Plasma Structures (gray), Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (dark yellow), Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF, blue), Plasma Jet Magneto Inertial Fusion (PJMIF, dark pink). Various authors have also put forth ways to organize all the fusion approaches that have been tested over the past 70+ years.
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