Radiation loss from inertially confined degenerate plasmas

Bremsstrahlung is one of the most important energy loss mechanisms in achieving ignition, which is only possible above a threshold in temperature for a given fusion reaction and plasma conditions. A detailed analysis of the bremsstrahlung process in degenerate plasma points out that radiation energy loss is much smaller than the value given by the classical formulation. This fact seems not useful to relax ignition requirements in self-ignited targets, because it is only relevant at extremely high densities. On the contrary, it can be very positive in the fast ignition scheme, where the target is compressed to very high densities at a minimum temperature, before the igniting beamlet is sent in.