Colloquium Speaker, Scott Wilks (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), November 3, 2015 at 4pm

[Patterson, Robin L.]

Please take note of Colloquium taking place today, Tuesday, November 3, 2015 at 4:00 PM in The Robert Smith Seminar Room. There will be a reception in the Atrium at 3:45PM. Details concerning the talk are as follows:

Speaker:              Scott Wilks (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Date:                     Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Time:                     4:00 PM
Place:                    1080 Physics Research Building, The Robert Smith Seminar Room
Title:                     Fast ignition:  An Alternate Route to Inertial Confinement Fusion


Abstract:  Fusion holds the promise of being a safe and inexpensive energy source for the future, essentially burning deuterium obtained from heavy water to produce power in much the same way stars generate their energy. While a "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor" device is still extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future, significant progress has been made, and large fusion devices are now beginning to appear. In particular, Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), where a laser is used to implode a Deuterium-Tritium (DT) pellet to obtain a net energy gain, is poised to take a major step forward in the next few years. This progress, coupled with the rapid technological advances in high power lasers and computer simulation capabilities, has also spawned a number of new ideas related to ICF. In particular, a new concept known as "Fast Ignition", where lasers are used to rapidly heat a pre-compressed pellet of DT, looks promising as an alternative, though more speculative, route to fusion energy. This method of fusion relies heavily on the interaction of ultra-intense laser pulses with plasmas and solids to generate intense relativistic electron beams, the study of which has already produced many exotic spin-offs such as novel ion accelerators, warm dense matter sources, and electron-positron pair plasmas for use in laboratory astrophysics experiments.

The website for the colloquium is https://physics.osu.edu/physics-colloquium-schedule.



Robin
[The Ohio State University]
Robin Patterson
Undergraduate Program, Colloquium and Seminar Coordinator
Department of Physics
1040K Physics Research Building, 191 W. Woodruff Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210
(614) 292-8523 Office     (614) 292-7557 Fax
patterson.716 at osu.edu<mailto:patterson.716 at osu.edu> osu.edu<http://osu.edu/>

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