First measurement in a magnetic confinement fusion experiment of the H3+ IF 3.2 2区 物理与天体物理 Q2 PHYSICS, NUCLEAR Physical Review C Pub Date : 2024-05-23 DOI:10.1103/physrevc.109.054620 B. Eriksson, S. Conroy, G. Ericsson, J. Eriksson, A. Hjalmarsson, C. R. Brune, M. G. Johnson, M. Nocente, S. Fugazza, M. Rebai

Abstract

We report on the first experimental measurements made at a magnetic confinement fusion device of the tritium(T)-tritium(T) reaction T+T→He4+2n indicating the presence of the intermediate two-body resonant reaction T+T→He5+n. During the second deuterium-tritium campaign (DTE2) at the Joint European Torus, measurements of fusion plasmas with high tritium concentrations, nT/(nT+nD)≈0.99, heated with tritium neutral beam injection, were performed using the neutron time-of-flight (TOF) spectrometer TOFOR. We detect a peak in the neutron emission TOF spectrum consistent with the two-body resonant reaction. The TT neutron emission energy spectrum is modeled using an R-matrix framework where the distributions of the most likely model parameters given our experimental TOF data are determined utilizing a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. We compare our best estimate of the T+T neutron emission energy spectrum with results obtained at inertial confinement fusion experiments at the OMEGA facility and find a spectral shape that is consistent with the energy dependency in the neutron spectrum observed at OMEGA. Published by the American Physical Society 2024