The 2025 NIF and JLF User Groups meeting was held Feb. 11-13 at Garre Vineyards in Livermore. Credit: Jason Laurea
(Download Image)Prominence of LLNL Laser Science on Display at NIF-JLF User Groups Meeting
The progress made to capitalize on and sustain the National Ignition Facility (NIF)’s capabilities, and the scientific advancements made in the Jupiter Laser Facility (JLF)’s first full year of operations following a major refurbishment were highlighted during this year’s NIF and JLF User Groups Meeting.
The three-day joint conference, held from Feb. 11-13 in Livermore, drew about 180 attendees, including scientists and researchers from around the world who use the two renowned laser facilities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to explore a broad range of fundamental Discovery Science.
In her welcoming address, LLNL Director Kim Budil said members of the two users groups have a “huge opportunity” this year to explain to a wider audience how LLNL and the nation’s national laboratories play critical roles “not just in advancing the cause of science, but in demonstrating real leadership in these fields.”
“You write papers, you give talks, you promote this important relationship between the broader scientific community and the national labs,” Budil said. “This is a moment to tell our story and to build our constituency.”
Jeff Wisoff, NIF & Photon Science principal associate director, explained how the annual conference delivers an important message of deterrence to the nation’s potential adversaries, one of the Lab’s main missions for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
“Whether you know it or not, your presence is also a big part of our main mission, which is deterrence,” Wisoff said. “By the world seeing the talent that is in this room and the papers you put out, they know that we’re taking care of business.”
As in recent years, the conference was again held at Garré Vineyard & Winery in Livermore, just south of the LLNL campus. The event is a joint meeting of the groups of scientists, researchers, professors, and graduate and undergraduate students who propose and conduct Discovery Science experiments at NIF, the world’s most energetic laser, and at JLF, an intermediate-scale user facility that offers three laser platforms—Janus, Titan, and COMET.
NIF Director Gordon Brunton outlined the “tremendous progress” made since last year’s NIF-JLF Users Groups meeting, including additional experiments that have achieved net energy gain.
Exploring the high energy density science regimes made possible since the initial historic achievement of fusion ignition on Dec. 5, 2022, allows NIF to better serve its mission as a key element of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP).
“There's still a lot of opportunity for pushing the performance of NIF even further,” Brunton said.
Brunton outlined how improvements in key diagnostics such as the workhorse flexible imaging diffraction diagnostic for laser experiments (FIDDLE) and the extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) diagnostic are providing better data for scientists working on Discovery Science and SSP experiments.
“This is another example where Discovery Science and the advancements of platforms necessary to support fundamental science missions really connect directly into enabling new stockpile stewardship capabilities,” he said. “That shows how the two programs really are symbiotic in the advancement of our missions.”
Brunton also outlined the five-year NIF Sustainment Plan of needed refurbishment and recapitalization efforts, meant to ensure NIF can carry out its vital missions through its design lifetime of 2040, and the Enhanced Yield Capability (EYC) plan that could boost NIF’s laser energy from 2.2 megajoules (MJ) to 2.6 MJ.
Those projects will answer important questions to aid defining requirements for a future facility capable of “hundreds of megajoules” of fusion energy yield. Such a facility “can truly replace capabilities that we’ve lost since underground testing stopped,” Brunton said.
For JLF, 2024 marked the first full year of operations since a major four-year refurbishment of the facility was completed in late 2023, said JLF Director Félicie Albert. And the facility, which includes the fifth-highest energy laser in the U.S., celebrated the 50th anniversary of when its first laser, Janus, was installed (see “Jupiter Laser Facility Gets a Reboot”).
“We've had so many things to be proud of in 2024,” Albert said.
Among the upgrades JLF is now able to offer users is a new pulse-shaping capability named STILETTO (Space-Time Induced Linearly Encoded Transcription for Temporal Optimization), which can generate more than 1,000 beam features within a 1-nanosecond span. The Titan laser also has new more efficient gratings.
JLF also offers a newly redesigned website at jlf.llnl.gov.
Over the years, JLF has also helped “recruit the next generation of talents and scientists,” Albert said. “And many of our users have continued to stay in the field and have gone on to have really great careers. So JLF is really a stepping-stone to many ideas, great science, and many great people.”
The conference featured about 40 talks, including an overview by LLNL’s Tammy Ma of efforts to develop a national inertial fusion energy (IFE) ecosystem to help quicken the pace of technologies needed for the field.
“We need to find innovative ways to partner, pool resources and develop a critical mass of funding in an effort to accelerate progress in these key technologies,” said Ma, who leads LLNL’s IFE Institutional Initiative.
And LLNL scientist Daniel Casey presented a talk on the first plasma-electron screening experiment at NIF (see “Showing How Plasma Electrons Can Enhance Fusion Reaction Rates”).
Other LLNL speakers included Omar Hurricane, Chris Walsh, Andrew Ratkiewicz, Elizabeth Grace, Derek Mariscal, Matthew Selwood, Drew Higginson, Brianna Arth, Matthew Jones, and Larry Pelz.
Presenters also included Mathieu Bailly-Grandvaux and Sheron Tavares, UC San Diego; Alexis Casner, French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); Hendrik Schatz, Michigan State University; Michael Paul, Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics; Patrick Adrian, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Arun Persaud, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Eric Sung and Luke Fletcher, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Ryan Rygg, Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester; Raymond Jeanloz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Ivan Oleynik, University of South Florida.
The annual conference poster contest drew 76 entries. In the graduate scholar category, Skylar Dannhoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was awarded first place and Zaire Sprowal of the University of Rochester won second place. SLAC’s Eric Sung won first place in the postdoctoral scholar category.
General Atomics, Luxel Corporation, and Prism Computational Sciences Inc. sponsored the poster awards and additional hospitality events. In addition, 42 students were able to attend the event through the support of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
Wisoff especially encouraged early career scientists in the room to take advantage of the “very unique science” provided by NIF and JLF, noting there is now an “inflection point” in HED science.
“Between ignition, between the interest in fusion energy, between other facilities being built in the world, this field is really coming of age,” Wisoff said. “There’s a lot of people who are very experienced in this field. They have a lot of great ideas. But the young people in this room also have great ideas. Make sure your ideas get known.”
The technical program was organized by the NIF User Group Executive Committee, particularly chair Louise Willingale of the University of Michigan and vice chair Maria Gatu Johnson of MIT, with help from NIF User Office Director Kevin Fournier. The meeting was hosted and organized by the NIF User Office team: Katie Mathisen, Rachel Ghilarducci, AJ Salaices, and Chalena Ramirez. LLNL’s Jesse Davis and Don Harrison provided audio-visual support.
More Information:
Jupiter Laser Facility User Hub
“Ignition Takes Center Stage at NIF and JLF User Groups Meeting,” NIF & Photon Science News, April 10, 2024
“NIF and JLF User Groups Look Beyond Ignition to Bright Possibilities in Science,” NIF & Photon Science News, May 4, 2023
“LLNL’s NIF Delivers Record Laser Energy,” NIF & Photon Science News, November 16, 2023
“NIF and JLF User Groups Cite HED Science Successes Amid Pandemic,” NIF & Photon Science News, March 15, 2022
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