Research and Development of Compact Neutron Sources based on Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion

Recent progress is described in the research and development of an inertial‐electrostatic confinement fusion (IECF) device. Use of a water‐cooling jacket with non‐uniform thickness shows promising success for landmine detection application, such as effective channeling of neutron flux toward the target and a very stable dc yield in excess of 107 D‐D neutrons/sec. Addition of an ion source to the conventional glow‐discharge‐driven IECF enhances the converging deuterium ion energy distribution by allowing a lower operating gas pressure. Improvement in normalized neutron yield, which corresponds to the fusion cross‐section averaged over the device radius, by a factor often has been observed.