Using High-Power, Pulsed Lasers to Generate Hot, Dense Environments: A Fusion Testbed

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Speaker(s): Tom Donnelly

When they where first invented in 1960, someone quipped that “Lasers are a solution waiting for a problem.” That challenge has been met so effectively that today lasers are ubiquitous in everyday life, to say nothing of their presence in laboratories. A series of scientific, engineering, and material-science breakthroughs have allowed lasers to become ever more powerful, and today laser pulses are produced which reach a peak power in excess of 1 PW ((10^{15}) W). For comparison, this is many hundred times the power carried on the entire US electrical grid. I will discuss some of the basic ideas used to build these high-power lasers, and then will describe work that I have done at HMC, the University of Texas at Austin, and Imperial College, London studying the interaction of high-power laser pulses with micron-scale targets. In particular, I will describe how we have tailored the laser-matter interactions to produce hot, dense systems that can act as a fusion plasma.

Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.