October 2023

For her landmark work in the development and application of shock physics techniques to explain the origin and evolution of planetary systems, Sarah Stewart has been selected as an American Physical Society Fellow. The prestigious honor is one that no more than half of one percent of the society’s membership (excluding student members) are nominated for each year. Read the full article.

September 2023

Alex Li, an LLNL summer student in the Computational Chemistry and Materials Science Summer Institute, recently led a study to investigate the evolution of plasticity in diamond. The nature of this deformation is important for high energy density experiments on high-energy laser systems such as NIF, as well as for furthering scientific understanding of carbon-rich exoplanets. Read the full article.

January 2023

Farhat Beg, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego and a renowned high energy density science expert, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Shao-Chi and Lily Lin Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Engineering Science.

The Lin Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Engineering Science was established with a $1 million gift from Lily Lin in honor of her late husband, Jacobs School of Engineering Professor Emeritus Shao-Chi Lin, to support the teaching, research and service activities of a distinguished faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. An additional $500,000 matching endowment was created as a part of the Chancellor’s Endowed Chair Challenge.  Read full announcement.

January 2022

We are pleased and excited to announce that, as of October 25, 2021, the Flash Center for Computational Science officially moved from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Chicago to the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Rochester. 

The Flash Center is home to several cross-disciplinary computational physics research projects, anchored by the development and stewardship of the FLASH code, the publicly available high-performance computing, multi-physics simulation code that the center will continue to distribute from the University of Rochester. FLASH, developed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, is employed by a wide international userbase, more than 3,500 scientists strong, for modeling and simulation in a broad range of application domains that span from plasma physics and astrophysics to computational fluid dynamics, high energy density physics (HEDP), and fusion energy research.  Read full announcement.

January 2022

Our ENLACE binational summer research program was established with the aim of encouraging the participation of high school and college students in research in the sciences and engineering, while promoting cross-border friendships between the United States and Mexico. The program unites students around science and engineering questions and concurrently engages them in a rich curriculum that promotes understanding of broader societal issues of equity, inclusion, tolerance, and social justice. Because we built our program around hope and cooperation, it is our aspiration and promise that walls and borders─all kinds of walls and borders─can be eradicated through kindness, compassion, and respect for others. ENLACE is not just a program we organize every summer, it is also a program that defines who we are as people and the kind of contribution we want to make in the world.

January 12, 2021

Gaia Righi, Ph.D. candidate from UC San Diego, collaborates with Hye-Sook Park and Rob Rudd from LLNL.  Her advisor is Marc Meyers. The team was awarded an ACT-UP award last year for their project titled, "Dynamic Strength of Iron Under Phase Changing Conditions".

July 27, 2020

Christoph Niemann, professor of physics and UCLA collaborator,  has been awarded the 2020 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. 

Citation: "For generating Weibel-mediated collisionless shocks in the laboratory, impacting a broad range of energetic astrophysical scenarios, plasma physics, and experiments using high energy and high power lasers conducted at basic plasma science facilities."

July 22, 2020

Warren Mori, professor of physics and UCLA site lead,  has been awarded the 2020 APS Maxwell Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics. 

Citation: "For leadership in and pioneering contributions to the theory and kinetic simulations of nonlinear processes in plasma-based acceleration, and relativistically intense laser and beam plasma interactions."

February 19-20, 2020

View the presentation and learn more.

2019

Petros Tzeferacos, professor of physics and U of C collaborator,  has been awarded the 2019 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research. 

Citation: "For innovative experiments that demonstrate turbulent dynamo in the laboratory, establishing laboratory experiments as a component in the study of turbulent magnetized plasmas, and opening a new path to laboratory investigations of other astrophysical processes."

February 19-20, 2019

View the presentation and learn more.

January 22, 2019

The UC Santa Cruz team published an article describing wave patterns created within Saturn's rings by the planet's internal vibrations. They explain that Saturn's distinctive rings were observed in unprecedented detail by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and scientists have now used those observations to probe the interior of the giant planet and obtain the first precise determination of its rotation rate. The length of a day on Saturn, according to their calculations, is 10 hours 33 minutes and 38 seconds. Their findings were also highlighted in a UC News Letter.  Read more.

December 3, 2018

A team led by Center for Energy Research scientists Chris McGuffey, Joohwan Kim, and Prof. Farhat Beg have shown that proton beams, which are well-studied products of intense lasers, can locally heat a gold sample to over 35 eV, or 400,000 degrees. But, surprisingly, the heating strongly depended on what material was in front of the gold, suggesting that the energy lost by the beam in the hot materials is far different from what existing cold models predict. The experiment was carried out at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Trident Laser at Los Alamos National Laboratory with collaborators at Trident, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, General Atomics, the University of Alberta, and the Ohio State University. The work is described in an article published today in Nature’s online journal Scientific Reports.