News

High Energy Density Science PhD student Jason Chou has been awarded the Best Poster award at the LaserNetUS Users Meeting 2021 for his work on "Optimizing ion beam quality from laser radiation pressure acceleration".  Many congratulations to Jason!

Scientists have come tantalizingly close to reproducing the power of the sun — albeit only in a speck of hydrogen for a fraction of a second. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported on Tuesday that by using 192 gigantic lasers to annihilate a pellet of hydrogen, they were able to ignite a burst of more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power — energy released when hydrogen atoms are fused into helium, the same process that occurs within stars.

Frederico Fiuza has received a DOE ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge grant of 820,000 node-hours (65,6 million NERSC hours) on the supercomputer Cori. This project will use large-scale first-principles simulations of high-energy-density laboratory and astrophysical plasmas to identify the dominant mechanisms responsible for particle heating and particle acceleration in collisionless shocks.

High Energy Density Science PhD student J. Ryan Peterson has been awarded the best poster prize at the European Physical Society conference in Plasma Physics for his work on "Magnetic field amplification by a nonlinear relativistic pair-driven plasma instability". Many congratulations to Ryan!

Ryan's work explores a new nonlinear electron streaming instability that can play an important role in magnetic field amplification in both high-energy astrophysical scenarios (e.g. GRBs and blazar jets) and laboratory laser-driven HED plasmas.

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) announced the DOE Mission Science Allocation Awards for Year 2021 and the proposal led by Dr. Mianzhen Mo from the High Energy Density Science Division at SLAC was awarded 3,000,000 processor hours.