NIF&PS Employees Capture LLNL Awards

NIF & Photon Science individuals and teams received 2018 Operational Excellence, Excellence in Science & Technology, and Publications awards in recognition of their important accomplishments that contribute to the successful execution of the Lab’s missions.

On Sept. 5, the Director’s Office presented the 11th annual Institutional Operational Excellence Awards to 170 employees divided among nine teams. Each winner received a commemorative coin, and for some, a cash award (managers and supervisory-level honorees receive recognition but no monetary award).

Each directorate is asked to submit nominations that support institutional goals and have significant, positive impact on the Laboratory’s work. The NIF & Photon Science award went to the team responsible for developing the capability to perform one cryogenic layer shot per week on NIF.

Growing the wafer-thin layer of cryogenically cooled, solid deuterium-tritium (DT) fuel in the target capsule is one of the most demanding aspects of preparing targets for NIF ignition experiments. Only 69 microns wide—about two-thirds the average width of a human hair—and frozen to 18.5 kelvins (minus-426 degrees Fahrenheit), the "DT ice" layer must be extremely smooth and free of grooves or other defects before the target can be approved for use in an experiment.

Cryogenically cooling the fuel to just below the freezing point of hydrogen, which changes hydrogen’s phase from a gas to a liquid and finally to a solid, enhances the density of the fuel and improves the chances of achieving the required density for ignition. The team implemented a broad array of improvements in equipment, experimental designs, processes, training, and facility scheduling to increase the number of NIF cryogenic layered experiments.

Recipients were Suhas Bhandarkar, Travis Briggs, Robert Burr, Christine Choate, Chris Czajka, Edgar Degiovanni, Kevin Fournier, Jon Fry, Chuck Gibson, Gayatri Gururangan, Thomas Kohut, Derrick Lassle, Abbas Nikroo, Thomas Parham, James Sater, Tayyab Suratwala, Richard Town, Curtis Walters, and Pam Whitman.

Director’s Science and Technology Awards

Lab Director Bill Goldstein and Deputy Director for Science and Technology Pat Falcone presented the 2018 S&T and Excellence in Publication awards to 18 project teams, conference presenters and journal authors for their exceptional endeavors in science and technology.

The Director’s S&T Awards Program was implemented in 2000 to acknowledge, celebrate, and reward recent significant scientific and technical accomplishments by Laboratory staff. NIF&PS recipients were:

First Experimental Evidence for Superionic Water

The team developed the first experimental evidence that water may become "superionic" when heated to several thousand degrees at high pressure, similar to the conditions inside giant planets like Uranus and Neptune. This exotic state of water is characterized by liquid-like hydrogen ions moving within a solid lattice of oxygen—in effect, water behaving as both a liquid and a solid simultaneously.

Team members are Marius Millot, Sébastien Hamel, Peter Celliers, Federica Coppari, Dayne Fratanduono, Damian Swift, Jon Eggert, Antonio Correa Barrios, Carol David, James Emig, Eric Folsom, Renee Sharlaine Posadas, and Timothy Uphaus of LLNL; Raymond Jeanloz of UC Berkeley; and Rip Collins and J. Ryan Rygg of the University of Rochester.

Development and Fielding of a High-energy X-ray Backlighter for NIF

The team developed hard x-ray point projection sources generated by NIF’s Advanced Radiographic Capability laser system to record high spatial- and temporal-resolution radiographs of a driven high-energy-density target.

Team members are David Martinez, Thomas Dittrich, Sharon Glendinning, Mark Hermann, Shahab Khan, Daniel Kalantar, Riccardo Tommasini, Richard Seugling, Jonathan Ward, Elvin Monzon, Matthew Arend, Christopher Santos, Warren Hsing, Abbas Nikroo, Stephan MacLaren, Kevin Baker, Danielle Hare, Shannon Ayers, Shon Prisbrey, Alan Wan, Ronald Sigurdsson, Jared Okui, Thomas Zobrist, Michael Rubery, and David Palmer.

Deputy Director for Science and Technology Excellence in Publication Awards

Postdocs

"Lifetime Laser Damage Performance of β-Ga2O3 for High Power Applications," by Jae-Hyuck Yoo, published on March 20, 2018, in APL Materials.

Yoo’s paper reported on systematic laser damage performance tests that established that gallium oxide (Ga2O3) has the highest lifetime optical damage performance of any conductive material measured to date, above 10 joules per square centimeter. This has direct implications for its use as an active component in high-power laser systems and may give insight into its utility for high-power switching applications.

Team Awards

"Thermonuclear Reactions Probed at Stellar-core Conditions with Laser-based Inertial-confinement fusion," published on August 7, 2017, in Nature Physics.

The paper, a collaboration among LLNL, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Ohio University, reported on the first thermonuclear measurements of nuclear reaction cross-sections—a quantity that describes the probability that reactants will undergo a fusion reaction—in high-energy-density plasma conditions that are equivalent to the burning cores of giant stars, 10 to 40 times more massive than the sun.

Authors are Daniel Casey, Daniel Sayre, Vladimir Smalyuk, Christopher Weber, Robert Tipton, Jesse Pino, Gary Grim, Bruce Remington, David Dearborn, Robin Benedetti, Robert Hatarik, Nobuhiko Izumi, James McNaney, Tammy Ma, Stephan MacLaren, Jay Salmonson, Shahab Khan, Arthur Pak, Laura Berzak Hopkins, Sebastien Le Pape, Brian Spears, Nathan Meezan, Laurent Divol, Charles Yeamans, Joseph Caggiano, Dennis McNabb, Dean Holunga, Marina Chiarappa-Zucca, Thomas Kohut and Thomas Parham of LLNL; Maria Gatu Johnson and Johan Frenje of MIT; Carl Brune of Ohio University; and George Kyrala of LANL.