NNSA visits HEDP Lab

National Nuclear Security Administration  |  NNSA Blog

January 27, 2017

On Thursday, January 19, NNSA’s Principal Assistant Deputy Administrator for Military Application Brig. Gen. Michael Lutton and Dr. Njema Frazier, physicist in the NNSA’s Office of Defense Programs, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., to meet with the High Energy Density (HED) and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Physics Division of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. 

MIT’s HED/ICF Division has more than 25 years of collaboration with Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratories, and the national High Energy Density Physics research community that supports NNSA’s missions.

Dr. Richard Petrasso, who heads the High-Energy-Density Physics Division, hosted Lutton and Frazier and explained some of the award-winning research and experimentation his team does for NNSA’s missions and the community.

Several leading-edge MIT doctoral theses have come out of work performed at NNSA facilities, including national award- and fellowship-winning research, and the first doctoral students to utilize in their research shots on NNSA’s National Ignition Facility (NIF). The MIT-NIF Ph.D. Program enables students to perform outstanding research and then equips them to take on important and leadership roles in NNSA programs, advancing the missions of the Nuclear Security Enterprise.

“The way the Ph.D. program makes ‘double’ use of NIF shots that support NNSA missions is a great credit to the NIF program, management, and scientists at NNSA,” Petrasso said. “Four such Ph.D.s from the MIT-NIF Ph.D. program have gone on to NNSA facilities, and five more are in the works.”

In addition to a tour and overview of some of the team’s work, all the MIT HED/ICF graduate students presented their thesis material to Lutton and Frazier and engaged in follow up discussions.

“We greatly appreciate the opportunity to meet with General Lutton and Dr. Frazier, and to show them the scope of student and staff research at the National Ignition Facility, OMEGA laser, Z-machine and the MIT HED/ICF laboratory, and especially to highlight the outstanding Ph.D. work of the students,” Petrasso said. “At the heart of MIT’s program has been its long lasting collaboration with LLE, LLNL, SNL, LANL and NNSA.”

Topics: Plasma science, Accelerators & detectors, High-energy-density physics, Richard Petrasso

Related

Defense Program leaders’ visit highlights collaboration with MIT Lab and researchers (National Nuclear Security Administration)

Mike Rosenberg wins Rosenbluth Award (PSFC)