Recent MIT graduate Francesco Sciortino (MIT PhD’21) has been honored with the 2022 Piovesan Award for the best PhD thesis in "physics of controlled fusion."
Johan Frenje, head of the PSFC High-Energy-Density Physics Division, former Division Head Richard Petrasso and Research Scientist Maria Gatu-Johnson share, with other team members, the Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award for achieving ignition and energy gain larger than 1.0.
On that morning of December 5, for the first time ever, the lasers delivered 2.1. megajoules of energy and yielded 3.15 megajoules in return, achieving an historic fusion energy gain well above 1—a result verified by diagnostic tools developed by the MIT PSFC.
“When I look up at the moon with my sweetheart, my wife of 48 years, I imagine that streaming from its dark side are electron holes that my students and I predicted and that we then discovered,” says Ian Hutchinson. “It’s quite sentimental to me.”
PSFC researchers and colleagues are using machine learning to track turbulent structures ("blobs") in fusion plasmas, which can affect the energy generated during fusion reactions.
AIP Publishing has selected MIT Professor Ian H. Hutchinson as the recipient of its 2022 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics for his paper, “Electron holes in phase space: What they are and why they matter.”
Three members of the PSFC High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) Division have been honored with the APS John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research: Maria Gatu Johnson, Richard Petrasso and Johan Frenje.