How Did They Actually Achieve Ignition?
The team used a set of 192 lasers to deliver 2.05 megajoules of energy. This was set to hit a pea-sized gold cylinder containing a frozen pellet of hydrogen isotopes: deuterium and tritium. The pulse of energy this created caused the capsule to collapse, resulting in temperatures that have only ever been seen in stars and thermonuclear weapons. The hydrogen then fused into helium, which released more energy and created a cascade of fusion reactions. This reaction released around 3.15 megajoules of energy. That is around 54% more than the energy that went into the reaction itself. This clearly beats out their previous record by double, when they hit 1.3 megajoules.