Bringing ultrafast lasers into focus.
Three paths to nuclear energy. One ultrafast laser platform.
Fusion energy. Hybrid fusion-fission reactors. A new method for laser uranium enrichment. All from first principles of ultrafast laser-matter interaction.
Two barriers have blocked every ultrafast laser fusion experiment from reaching gain.
The National Ignition Facility proved that lasers can achieve net energy gain. But NIF uses nanosecond pulses and ablative compression — a hundred-billion-dollar architecture that fires once a day and converts three hundred megajoules of wall-plug power into two megajoules of light.
Femtosecond lasers deliver tens of terawatts at kilohertz repetition rates from a tabletop. They can accelerate ions directly to fusion energies. The reason no one has achieved gain with them comes down to two obstacles in the plasma physics.
Overcoming the critical density horizon.
A compact, high-repetition-rate fusion source that bypasses the hydrodynamic instabilities, facility scale, and target cost of inertial confinement fusion.
Subcritical assemblies driven by laser fusion neutrons.
Fusion neutrons from Cortex's laser drive a subcritical fission blanket — yielding nuclear energy without a self-sustaining chain reaction. The reactor cannot melt down because it cannot sustain criticality: remove the neutron source, and the reaction stops.
This architecture breeds and burns fuel inside the reactor, reducing fuel costs and waste, and qualifies for an entirely different regulatory pathway — without evacuation zones, and compatible with co-location at industrial sites.
A new method for isotope separation using ultrafast lasers.
Every previous attempt at laser uranium enrichment — AVLIS, MLIS, SILEX, CRISLA — required expensive narrowband lasers with low throughput. Billions were spent. None achieved commercial enrichment.
Cortex has invented a fundamentally different approach using commodity broadband ultrafast lasers. High assays in a single pass. Throughput sufficient to satisfy the entire national demand for high-assay low-enriched uranium from a single facility.
Worldwide patent portfolio.
Peer-reviewed science.
Built to bring nuclear energy from first principles to the grid.
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