Jean-Michel Di Nicola
Chief Systems Engineer
for Laser Systems
Co-Program Director,
Laser Science and Systems Engineering
Jean-Michel Di Nicola is the Chief Systems Engineer for laser systems at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) and Co-Program Director for Laser Science and Systems Engineering (LSSE) organization in the NIF & Photon Science Directorate. In this role, he has been leading the NIF laser performance enhancement (precision and accuracy), as well as the NIF Power and Energy IPT to increase the energy delivered to the target. Overall, he is responsible for overseeing the performance of the NIF laser systems, directing the development of laser physics codes, and leading the modeling efforts for advanced laser architecture designs.
Di Nicola was previously the lead scientist for the NIF Laser Performance and group leader for the Laser Modeling and Analysis Group.
Di Nicola’s expertise is in laser physics, nonlinear optics, laser modeling of high energy and high peak power lasers. He has served as the principal investigator in charge of the performance modeling and commissioning of the Laser Integration Line laser, a prototype of the French Laser Megajoule (LMJ), during a two-year experimental program leading to groundbreaking results and world record performance of 10kJ of UV energy on a single beamline.
In 2005, Di Nicola spent six months as an invited scientist to participate in NIF modeling tasks and laser codes development. In 2007, he was selected as a senior expert in nonlinear optics and laser performance modeling of ICF lasers by CEA/DAM. He returned to LLNL to take part in the NIF laser commissioning and joined LLNL in 2009. In 2023, He was selected as an Optica (formerly Optical Society of America) fellow “for world-class scientific and engineering contributions in high-energy and high-peak-power laser systems, and key technical leadership at the National Ignition Facility.”
Di Nicola received two M.S. degrees in optoelectronics from Caen University (France) in 1995, and in nonlinear optics and plasma physics from the University of Paris XI and Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau (France) in 1996. The same year, he joined the French Atomic Energy Commission, Direction of Military Applications (CEA/DAM), to work on the high energy laser program dedicated to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and stockpile stewardship. He developed the first laser performance operations models for the UV, kJ-class Phebus facility, sister of the LLNL’s NOVA facility.
He has received two R&D 100 Awards, four LLNL Director’s Science and Technology Awards, four NNSA Defense Programs Awards of Excellence for his contributions to NIF, and the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research as a member of the NIF Burning Plasma Team. He shares his passion for science by volunteering with middle-school and high-school math and science programs.
