EU – “Enabling Research” - project „laser ablation“ (HHU/FZ Juelich/KTH Stockholm)

It might happen in future fusion reactors that large amounts of tritium are collected in the chamber walls which is undesired and highly dangerous. A method is required to quantify this wall loading during operation. We want to find out here whether it is favourable to use an ultrashort-pulse laser for this task. The idea is to transform a microscopic spot on the wall surface into plasma. The plasma will emit light which contains spectral lines characteristic for tritium. The main question is: Will it be possible to detect the amount of tritium in the wall from the line intensities in a reliable way?

In our experiments we investigate the laser light absorption on the surface, optimize the plasma emission and improve the detection. Furthermore, we observe the effect of the laser radiation on the hit surface together with our project partners.

The project is supported by the "enabling research" program of the EU-organisation Euratom. We cooperate with colleagues at the Institute for Plasma Physics (IEK-4) in the Juelich Research Center and with the Department for Fusion Plasma Physics at the KTH in Stockholm.