Australia-based deep tech startup HB11 Energy has successfully exhibited what one of its physicist co-founders theoretically posited as a path to clean energy generation, utilizing high power, high precision lasers to start fusion reactions between hydrogen and boron-11 rather than heating hydrogen isotopes to hundred-million-degree temperatures.
The achievement came two years after the company had filed a patent application.
Using lasers instead of thermal fusion was something predicted in the 1970s at the University of New South Wales by Australian theoretical physicist and HB11 Energy co-founder, Heinrich Hora. It differs radically from most other fusion efforts which require the heating of hydrogen isotopes to millions of degrees.
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