The Laboratory of Plasma Studies carries out a wide range of fundamental and applied research in plasma physics including, fusion research and astrophysics investigations.
This broad range in plasma physics research is primordial to understand the different aspects of plasmas, from microscopic to macroscopic scales.
The integration between experiment, computation and theory is a unique trait of this lab.
The principal research objective of the Laboratory of Plasma Studies is to make use of our pulsed power facilities, computer simulation tools and diagnostic expertise to develop an understanding of high energy density (HED) plasmas from a fundamental perspective while contributing to the NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program. Other major objectives are:
to train graduate students and undergraduates in the field of HED plasma physics;
to enhance US capabilities in this field of physics; to help grow the U. S. scientific community in this area through interaction with university researchers around the world;
to provide high quality data to the HED community to help validate NNSA’s large scale computer codes;
to promote scientific interactions between members of our laboratory and scientist at the DOE/NNSA national laboratories on HED physics.
We work to accomplish these objectives by coordinating the activities of the six partner research groups and working collaboratively with members of partner research groups on individual projects and by participating in workshops and conferences that bring together HED researchers from many institutions. Our general philosophy is to do very careful, in depth and accurate work, including the appropriate null experiments to be sure that our results are on the strongest of foundations, and then we compare with the results of computer simulations both to help understand the experimental results and to help validate the computer code. Our laboratory collaborates with many institutions nationally (Sandia National Lab) and internationally (MAGPIE group at Imperial College in the UK).
