In 1960 John Nuckolls published the concept of inertial confinement fusion (ICF). The laser, introduced the same year, turned out to be a suitable "driver".
In 1961 the Soviet Union tested its 50 megaton Tsar Bomba, the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever.
Spitzer published a key plasma physics text at Princeton in 1963. He took the ideal gas laws and adapted them to an ionized plasma, developing many of the fundamental equations used to model a plasma.
Laser fusion was suggested in 1962 by scientists at LLNL. Initially, lasers had little power. Laser fusion (inertial confinement fusion) research began as early as 1965.
At the 1964 World's Fair, the public was given its first fusion demonstration. The device was a Theta-pinch from General Electric. This was similar to the Scylla machine developed earlier at Los Alamos.
By the mid-1960s progress had stalled across the world. All of the major designs were losing plasma at unsustainable rates. The 12-beam "4 pi laser" attempt at inertial confinement fusion developed at LLNL targeted a gas-filled target chamber of about 20 centimeters in diameter.
The magnetic mirror was first published in 1967 by Richard F. Post and many others at LLNL. The mirror consisted of two large magnets arranged so they had strong fields within them, and a weaker, but connected, field between them. Plasma introduced in the area between the two magnets would "bounce back" from the stronger fields in the middle.
A.D. Sakharov's group constructed the first tokamaks. The most successful were the T-3 and its larger version T-4. T-4 was tested in 1968 in Novosibirsk, producing the first quasistationary fusion reaction. When this was announced, the international community was skeptical. A British team was invited to see T-3, and confirmed the Soviet claims. A burst of activity followed as many planned devices were abandoned and tokamaks were introduced in their place—the C model stellarator, then under construction after many redesigns, was quickly converted to the Symmetrical Tokamak.
In his work with vacuum tubes, Philo Farnsworth observed that electric charge accumulated in the tube. In 1962, Farnsworth patented a design using a positive inner cage to concentrate plasma and fuse protons. During this time, Robert L. Hirsch joined Farnsworth Television labs and began work on what became the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor. This effect became known as the Multipactor effect. Hirsch patented the design in 1966 and published it in 1967.
Plasma temperatures of approximately 40 million degrees Celsius and 10 deuteron-deuteron fusion reactions per discharge were achieved at LANL with Scylla IV.
In 1968 the Soviets announced results from the T-3 tokamak, claiming temperatures an order of magnitude higher than any other device. A UK team, nicknamed "The Culham Five", confirmed the results. The results led many other teams, including the Princeton group, which converted their stellarator to a tokamak.