Synergistic progress in plasmas: from fusion to astrophysics

Over the last decade, several exciting directions have been initiated by laser-driven plasmas, e.g. compact particle accelerators, inertial fusion and laboratory astrophysics. The first has known rapid progress, in terms of current, energy, stability; fusion has gone through a historic step, with the news of ignition being achieved at NIF in 2022; and laboratory astrophysics has known also spectacular developments, demonstrating the possibility to perform fully scalable experiments relevant to various objects such as forming stars and supernovae. A particularly interesting aspect is that all these fields are strongly synergistic, i.e. that advances in one can push the others as well. I will present examples of such synergies, through recent results we have obtained in all these domains, and in particular how ultra-bright neutron beams can be developed using latest generation multi-PW lasers. These could open up interesting perspectives in terms of cargo inspection, but also for fusion plasma measurements. I will also show how fusion can benefit from external magnetization. Finally I will discuss advances in laboratory astrophysics, particularly the first-stage acceleration of ions leading to cosmic rays, understanding the universal nature of collimated outflows in the Universe, and probing the intricacy of 3D magnetic reconnection.