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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. 
Plasma instability
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.
Daniella Fenster
Join us for a special talk with Helen Quinn - a pioneering particle physicist and former Stanford professor - as she shares her journey through physics and discovery. Helen Quinn reflects on her experience as a woman foraging a path in physics and learn how she helped reshape our understanding of the universe.
Helen Quinn in the SLAC office in about 1977.
Researchers hoped to clarify the boundaries between different types of superionic water – the hot, black ice believed to exist at the core of giant ice planets. Instead, they found multiple atomic stacking patterns coexisting in overlapping configurations never seen before in this phase of water.
Researchers paired ultrafast X-rays with specialized instruments to study the atomic stacking structures of superionic water – a hot, black and strangely conductive form of ice that is believed to exist in the center of giant ice planets like Neptune and Uranus
In its early lifetime, Earth likely went through cycles of compression and decompression, buckling and eventually rebounding under the violent young solar system’s bombardment of asteroids and comets. Though we would never want to go back to this epoch, Zhang et al. have recreated similar conditions in a laboratory to help study our home’s history.
Fast compression and pressure cycling alter phase transitions in iron-nickel alloys
With a new method that could be extended to study Earth’s core and nuclear fusion, they identify and explain jumps in the electrical conductivity of aluminum under extreme conditions.
A short laser pulse (red) heats a sheet of aluminum, causing it to melt and break up into droplets. Below, a terahertz pulse (gray) passes through the now molten metal.
  Students from the HEDS division joined SLAC's Holiday Social, recreating the HEDS division in gingerbread form as part of a SLAC-wide competition. 
HEDS students with their completed gingerbread house

To achieve peak energy output, inertial fusion energy targets must be perfectly symmetrical and perform under extreme temperatures and pressures. Researchers at SLAC are developing experimental techniques to evaluate new target candidates. 

Graphic representation of lasers converging on a single fusion fuel capsule in an inertial fusion energy reaction chamber.
  Arianna Gleason, the deputy director of the HEDS division, was announced as a newly elected Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the fields of mineralogy, crystallography, geochemistry, and petrology.
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