Elena V. Belova is a former Soviet and American physicist whose research involves the computer simulation of plasma, with applications ranging from the control of heat in tokamak-based fusion power [1] [2] to improved understanding of jets and spheromaks in the solar corona. [3] She works for the United States Department of Energy as a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey. [4]
Belova studied physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in 1984 and a master's degree in 1987. From 1987 to 1992, she worked at the Russian Space Research Institute in Moscow. [5] in 1992, she emigrated to the US with her husband, physicist Alexander V. Khrabrov. She went to Dartmouth College for graduate study in physics, [6] supervised by Mary Hudson. [5] She finished her Ph.D. in 1997, and on completing her doctorate became a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. [6]
Belova was the 2005 winner of the Katherine Weimer Award for Women in Plasma Science, given by the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics, "for pioneering analytical and numerical contributions to the fundamental physics of magnetically confined plasmas". [7] She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2020, after a nomination from the Division of Plasma Physics, "for outstanding contributions to the development of novel numerical and theoretical models leading to improved understanding of the behavior of highly energetic particles and associated plasma instabilities in compact tori and spherical tokamaks". [6] [8]
John Myrick Dawson was an American computational physicist and the father of plasma-based acceleration techniques. Dawson earned his degrees in physics from the University of Maryland, College Park: a B.S. in 1952 and Ph.D. in 1957. His thesis "Distortion of Atoms and Molecules in Dense Media" was prepared under the guidance of Zaka Slawsky.
John Morgan Greene was an American theoretical physicist and applied mathematician, known for his work on solitons and plasma physics.
Nicholas Krall is an American theoretical plasma physicist. Dr Krall has authored over 160 science publications and has contributed to the fields of electron scattering, plasma stability, high energy nuclear physics and magnetohydrodynamics. He has worked at General Atomics, the University of California, San Diego, the Naval Research Laboratory and University of Maryland.
Sir Steven Charles Cowley is a British theoretical physicist and international authority on nuclear fusion and astrophysical plasmas. He has served as director of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) since 1 July 2018. Previously he served as president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since October 2016. and head of the EURATOM / CCFE Fusion Association and chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA).
Robert James Goldston is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University and a former director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Sibylle Günter is a German theoretical physicist researching tokamak plasmas. Since February 2011, she has headed the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. In October 2015, she was elected a member of the Academia Europaea in recognition of her contribution to research.
The Model C stellarator was the first large-scale stellarator to be built, during the early stages of fusion power research. Planned since 1952, construction began in 1961 at what is today the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The Model C followed the table-top sized Model A, and a series of Model B machines that refined the stellarator concept and provided the basis for the Model C, which intended to reach break-even conditions. Model C ultimately failed to reach this goal, producing electron temperatures of 400 eV when about 100,000 were needed. In 1969, after UK researchers confirmed that the USSR's T-3 tokamak was reaching 1000 eV, the Model C was converted to the Symmetrical Tokamak, and stellarator development at PPPL ended.
Miklos Porkolab (born March 24, 1939) is a Hungarian-American physicist specializing in plasma physics.
Leonid Eremeyevich Zakharov is a Russian physicist who is a researcher at Princeton University. He attended Lomonosov Moscow State University (1965–1971). He was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after they were nominated by their Division of Plasma Physics in 2007, for "contributions to the theory and numerical calculation of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria, stability, and transport in toroidal plasma confinement devices and for innovative ideas concerning the development of a lithium walled tokamak as an approach to an economic reactor."
Harold Porter Eubank was an American physicist, specializing in magnetic fusion energy research.
Félicie Albert is a French-born American physicist working on laser plasma accelerators. She is the deputy director for the Center for High Energy Density Science at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and staff scientist at the National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Directorate and the Joint High Energy Density Sciences organization. She received BS in 2003 in engineering from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Physique de Marseille, in France, her master's degree in optics from the University of Central Florida in 2004 and her PhD from Ecole Polytechnique in 2007, before joining LLNL as a postdoctoral fellow in 2008. Her main expertise are "the generation and applications of novel sources of electrons, X-rays and gamma-rays through laser-plasma interaction, laser-wakefield acceleration and Compton scattering."
Nathaniel Joseph Fisch is an American plasma physicist known for pioneering the excitation of electric currents in plasmas using electromagnetic waves, which was then used in tokamak experiments. This contributed to an increased understanding of plasma wave–particle interactions in the field for which he was awarded the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics in 2005 and the Hannes Alfvén Prize in 2015.
Masaaki Yamada is a Japanese plasma physicist known for his studies on magnetic reconnection.
Keith Howard Burrell is an American plasma physicist.
Katherine Ella Mounce Weimer was a research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at the Princeton University. She is known for her scientific research in the field of plasma magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium and contribution to stability theory of a magnetically confined plasma.
Paulett Creyke Liewer is an American plasma physicist whose research has spanned scales from particle-in-cell simulation and microturbulence in tokamaks to the observation of solar flares and the boundary of the heliosphere. She is a principal scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Michael Thomas Kotschenreuther is an American physicist.
Fatima Ebrahimi is an Iranian-American physicist and inventor. She carries out theoretical and computational plasma physics research for applications including fusion energy and space and astrophysical plasmas.
Tammy Ma is an American plasma physicist who works on inertial confinement fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Cynthia Elizabeth Kieras Phillips was an American physicist known for her work on plasma, and on the use of radio waves to heat plasma for applications in magnetic confinement fusion.