University of Rochester and Focused Energy establish $6.9 million partnership

Focused Energy and the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have established a $6.9 million partnership agreement to collaborate on fundamental challenges in inertial fusion energy.

The partnership aims to investigate laser-plasma instabilities, which disrupt the delivery of laser energy to the target in inertial confinement fusion experiments, reducing efficiency. These instabilities are a combination of multiple phenomena, including cross-beam energy transfer, stimulated Raman scatter, and two-plasmon decay.

LLE will contribute its advanced experimental and modeling capabilities, including its Fourth-generation Laser for Ultra-broadband eXperiments (FLUX) system, which was built for the purpose of mitigating and suppressing laser-plasma instabilities by producing high-energy, high-bandwidth pulses that range from infrared to UV.

According to the University of Rochester, over the course of the multiyear collaboration, the partners will tightly couple experiments with advanced modeling tools to scale results from LLE's Omega Laser Facility to expected conditions at Focused Energy's planned fusion pilot plant. The team will design and test fusion targets, including hybrid shock concepts, to improve stability and performance, aiming to deliver practical guidance on laser and target configurations.

"Turning fusion from a scientific achievement into a reliable energy technology requires deep collaboration between world-class laboratories and companies setting the first power plants," said Thomas Forner, cofounder and CEO of Focused Energy. "Partnering with the LLE allows us to directly connect frontier plasma physics research with the engineering challenges of our fusion pilot plant-an essential step toward making inertial fusion energy a practical source of clean, firm power."

Public-private partnerships: LLE leads the Inertial Fusion Energy-Consortium on LPI (laser-plasma interaction) Research (IFE-COLoR), one of three Department of Energy fusion energy hubs established in December 2023. When the hubs were announced, Focused Energy was named a member of the Innovation and Reactor Engineering hub based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The company and national lab also signed a strategic partnership in 2023.

In 2024, Focused Energy and LLE received funding through the DOE's Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE) initiative, which provides support for fusion-related public-private partnerships, to perform LPI simulations for Focused Energy's target compression design.

According to a University of Rochester press release on the new partnership agreement, it builds on the INFUSE work and extends it within the broader framework of IFE-COLoR, of which Focused Energy is a member.

"Coupling LLE's experiments directly to Focused Energy's pilot plant modeling creates exactly the kind of feedback loop that moves fusion science forward-this is public-private partnership working the way it should. We're not just publishing results in isolation, we're helping to engineer a path to a working reactor," said Dustin Froula, division director at LLE and principal investigator for the IFE-COLoR Hub.

LLE has worked with multiple private companies. Last week, Xcimer Energy announced that it had completed an experiment focused on externally driven half-hohlraums at LLE, providing benchmark data for the company's modeling efforts.

Focused Energy: Focused Energy is one of eight fusion developers that were selected by the DOE for funding under the public-private Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program in May 2023. In January 2025, the DOE announced that it had confirmed that the company met the milestone of achieving computational modeling for a high-gain target design for laser-driven inertial fusion energy and demonstration of ion-beam focusing to support the fast-ignition approach to inertial fusion energy. Focused Energy is a German American company spun off from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2021.