News

Is putting carbon-free laser-driven fusion energy on the grid by the 2030s possible?

At the US IFE conference in Washington D.C., HEDS students were recognized for their outstanding poster presentations.  Erika Hunting was awarded the Targets, Materials, and IFE Applications prize for her poster "Studying ultrafast structural dynamics in W-Re", while Dani Brown won the Advancements in Ion and Proton Acceleration for IFE prize for "Resolving Species Contributions in Multi-Ion Spectra". Congratulations to both of them, along with all the other winners!  

Dick, who made significant contributions to plasma physics and high energy density science and had direct impact at SLAC, died in January.

Maitrayee Ghosh received the APS Distinguished Student Award from the American Physical Society Forum on International Physics and Forum for Early Career Scientists (FECS) at the APS Global Physics Summit 2026 in Denver, CO.

  PhD student Claudia Parisuaña defended her PhD thesis, "Hydrodynamics of warm dense matter enabled by X-ray free electron lasers" on March 12th, before her thesis committee of Prof. Mark Cappelli (Stanford), Prof. Ken Hara (Stanford), Prof. Patricia Burchat (Stanford), Dr. Arianna Gleason (SLAC) and Prof. Siegfried Glenzer (Stanford/SLAC).

In collaboration with the HEDS division, a Stanford team is exploring how new ultra-precise capsules could improve fusion reactors and other energy systems.  

The team developed a platform that uses powerful X-rays from the lab’s LCLS X-ray laser to resolve for the first time the evolution of instabilities in high-density plasmas. 

  PhD student Rebeca Toro defended her PhD thesis, "Transport Properties of Warm Dense Matter Probed by Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy" on February 4th, before her thesis committee of Prof. Mark Cappelli (Stanford), Prof. Debbie Senesky (Stanford), Prof. Mike Dunne (Stanford, Inertia), Prof. Ben Ofori-Okai (Stanford/SLAC) and Prof. Siegfried Glenzer (Stanford/SLAC).

When Daniella Fenster and her Global Sustainability Challenge teammates started looking for ideas for a project last year, they kept returning to news reports of people going without power for days or weeks after floods. Stories from Hong Kong, Jamaica, India, and across the United States inspired them to consider how they could improve people’s lives in the aftermath of a deluge.