Xcimer Energy Completes Experimental Fusion Shots at OMEGA Laser Facility

Xcimer Energy completed a series of experimental shots at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics OMEGA facility, the Denver-based fusion company announced on March 18, targeting a key physics validation milestone on the path toward its commercial Fusion Pilot Plant.

Scientists and engineers from Xcimer and three partner institutions conducted the campaign in February at the OMEGA Laser Facility through the National Laser Users' Facility program, a merit-based access program supported by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The experiments examined externally driven half-hohlraum configurations, known as halfraums, fabricated by General Atomics, which serves as Xcimer's collaborator on target factory design for the Fusion Pilot Plant. Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid rounded out the collaboration.

The halfraum work sits at the center of Xcimer's most technically audacious design choice: achieving a sufficiently symmetric implosion using only two laser beams. OMEGA itself uses 60 overlapping beams to demonstrate direct-drive physics, delivering more than 30 kilojoules of UV light on target with irradiation nonuniformity of just 1 to 2 percent. Xcimer's commercial design couples the majority of laser energy directly to the fuel capsule rather than routing it through a conventional hohlraum, and the company says a two-beam architecture is essential to minimizing chamber penetrations and enabling a thick-liquid-wall fusion blanket that mitigates neutron damage and activation issues. The company aims to field a NIF-style fuel capsule coupling approximately 10 megajoules of energy with capsule gains exceeding 200.

Beyond the physics data, the campaign served a second practical purpose. Key leaders, scientists, and engineers from Xcimer's Denver team worked directly alongside OMEGA facility operators, gaining firsthand exposure to shot execution and facility operations that the company says will directly inform scaling, operability, and system integration for its next facilities, codenamed Anvil and Vulcan.

OMEGA logged 294 target shots across 61 campaigns in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, averaging 91 percent availability and 95 percent experimental effectiveness, according to LLE's quarterly shot report. The facility has operated continuously since 1995 and handles up to 1,500 shots per year across its 60-beam architecture, with a shot cycle as short as one hour.

The OMEGA results feed directly into Xcimer's four-phase commercialization roadmap. The company's Phoenix prototype laser system, a 75,000-square-foot facility in Denver, was on track for completion in early Q2 2026. Phoenix carries three primary goals: validating excimer laser operation at microsecond-scale pulse lengths on its LPK platform, integrating a new Marx pulsed power technology for future KrF laser modules, and demonstrating Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in a nonlinear optical gas mirror for pulse compression at scale. The prototype SBS gas mirror is a 40-meter gas cell in which a low-energy short-duration seed beam crosses a high-energy long-duration pump produced by the KJC laser.

Following Phoenix, the Anvil phase will center on Argos, a full-scale commercial excimer amplifier module with output energy exceeding 100 kilojoules, intended to drive a demonstrator inertial fusion energy beamline. The OMEGA halfraum campaign, Xcimer says, strengthens the physics basis underpinning every step of that progression.