Dr Hugo Doyle, First Light Fusion

Hugo Doyle is Head of Experimental Physics at First Light Fusion Ltd. His team has been responsible for building the capability to experimentally validate fusion in the laboratory, proving the First Light projectile fusion concept earlier this year. This involved building a launcher to accelerate 1 cm scale projectiles to 10 km/s to impact deuterium tritium filled targets and measuring the burst of neutrons emitted, in the laboratory in Oxfordshire. Their focus is now switching to look at the next, much larger stage – a gain scale experiment.He has been at First Light for nine years. Before this he studied laser driven laboratory astrophysics during his PhD at Imperial and as a post-doc at Oxford which involved using some of the largest lasers in the world to reproduce conditions similar to those found at the centre of a star.