ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nucl. Eng.
Sec. Nuclear Reactor Design
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring the Future of Nuclear Fusion: Developments in Inertial Electrostatic Confinement and Emerging TechnologyView all articles
Evaluation of the Lawson Criterion for Aneutronic Proton-Boron-11 Fusion: Effects of Ion Temperature and Bremsstrahlung Losses
Provisionally accepted
Sitti Yani1*
Irfan Maulana Ahmad1
Abd. Djamil Husin1
Duong Thanh Tai2
Nissren Mohamed Ahmed Tamam3
Abdelmoneim Sulieman4- 1IPB University, Bogor, Indonesia
- 2Nguyen Tat Thanh University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- 3Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- 4King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences College of Nursing, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
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Nuclear fusion, the process of combining light nuclei to form heavier nuclei, offers a promising pathway to sustainable clean energy with minimal radioactive waste. The Lawson criterion, expressed as the product of plasma density, confinement time, and temperature, establishes the conditions required for ignition and net energy gain. This study investigates the Lawson criterion for proton-boron-11 (p-11B) fusion across ion temperatures of 75-500 keV, incorporating fusion reactivity data from Tentori-Belloni and Nevins-Swain, as well as energy losses from bremsstrahlung radiation under different electron-to-ion temperature ratios ( ๐๐ ๐๐=1, 0.5, 0.25). The Tentori-Belloni dataset yields higher fusion reactivity than Nevins-Swain, resulting in more favorable Lawson values. Net energy production is achieved only when ๐๐<๐๐, with optimal operating windows identified at 190-330 keV for ๐๐= 0.5๐๐ and 125-500 keV for ๐๐= 0.25๐๐. At ๐๐ < 230 keV, the Lawson criterion decreases due to plasma instabilities and confinement limitations; in this work, radiative losses are evaluated using ๐๐๐๐= 2.4 derived from the p-11B fuel mixture ( ๐๐ ๐๐ต= 90: 10) only, while external impurity contributions are not explicitly modeled. For ๐๐ > 230 keV, the Lawson criterion increases, reaching characteristic minima around 330 keV and 500 keV. These thresholds represent the minimum conditions required to achieve ignition and sustain a self-sufficient fusion reaction. The minimum Lawson values obtained were 1.3 ร 1022 m-3s (no radiation), 1.2 ร 1023 m-3s (๐๐= 0.5๐๐), and 1.5 ร 1022 m-3s (๐๐= 0.25๐๐). These findings highlight the critical role of accurate cross-section data and electron-This is a provisional file, not the final typeset article ion temperature control in advancing aneutronic p-ยนยนB fusion toward practical, self-sustained clean energy systems.
Keywords: Bremsstrahlung radiation, Fusion reaction, Fusion reactivity, Lawson criterion, Proton-Boron-11
Received: 17 Oct 2025; Accepted: 09 Feb 2026.
Copyright: ยฉ 2026 Yani, Ahmad, Husin, Tai, Tamam and Sulieman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sitti Yani
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