Sharon Gail Glendinning is an American experimental physicist.
Glendinning completed her bachelor degree in experimental physics at Middlebury College in 1973, and graduated from Duke University seven years later with a doctorate in the same field of study. [1] She published the dissertation Elastic and Inelastic Neutron Scattering Cross Sections for 10B, 11B, and 16O. [2] Glendinning remained at Duke to conduct postdoctoral research, and subsequently worked for General Electric within the nuclear fuels division. [1] In 1985, she joined the inertial confinement fusion program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). [1] Glendinning received the John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research from the American Physical Society in 1995. [1] Three years later, the APS elected her a fellow, "[f]or clear and illuminating experimental investigations of ablation-front Rayleigh-Taylor instability, laser imprinting, and nonlinear hydrodynamic instabilities relevant to inertial confinement fusion, high energy-density physics and astrophysics." [3] Glendinning retired from LLNL after 2020. [4]
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered privately by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC.
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a fusion energy process that initiates nuclear fusion reactions by compressing and heating targets filled with fuel. The targets are small pellets, typically containing deuterium (2H) and tritium (3H).
This timeline of nuclear fusion is an incomplete chronological summary of significant events in the study and use of nuclear fusion.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, United States. NIF's mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain. It achieved the first instance of scientific breakeven controlled fusion in an experiment on December 5, 2022, with an energy gain factor of 1.5. It supports nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear explosions.
David Herbert Munro is a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) who created the programming language Yorick as well as the scientific graphics library Gist.
Nova was a high-power laser built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, United States, in 1984 which conducted advanced inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments until its dismantling in 1999. Nova was the first ICF experiment built with the intention of reaching "ignition", a chain reaction of nuclear fusion that releases a large amount of energy. Although Nova failed in this goal, the data it generated clearly defined the problem as being mostly a result of Rayleigh–Taylor instability, leading to the design of the National Ignition Facility, Nova's successor. Nova also generated considerable amounts of data on high-density matter physics, regardless of the lack of ignition, which is useful both in fusion power and nuclear weapons research.
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.
Richard Freeman Post was an American physicist notable for his work in nuclear fusion, plasma physics, magnetic mirrors, magnetic levitation, magnetic bearing design and direct energy conversion.
The Tandem Mirror Experiment was a magnetic mirror machine operated from 1979 to 1987 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It was the first large-scale machine to test the "tandem mirror" concept in which two mirrors trapped a large volume of plasma between them in an effort to increase the efficiency of the reactor.
Miklos Porkolab (born March 24, 1939) is a Hungarian-American physicist specializing in plasma physics.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Ryutov is a Russian theoretical plasma physicist.
John D. Lindl is an American physicist who specializes in inertial confinement fusion (ICF). He is currently the chief scientist of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Keith Howard Burrell is an American plasma physicist.
The history of nuclear fusion began early in the 20th century as an inquiry into how stars powered themselves and expanded to incorporate a broad inquiry into the nature of matter and energy, as potential applications expanded to include warfare, energy production and rocket propulsion.
Christine Garban-Labaune is a French plasma physicist known for her research in inertial confinement fusion.
Tammy Ma is an American plasma physicist who works on inertial confinement fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Denise Hinkel is a plasma physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Stephanie Brooke Hansen is an American plasma physicist whose research applies both computational modeling and spectroscopy to inertial confinement fusion. She is a distinguished member of the technical staff in the inertial confinement fusion target design group at Sandia National Laboratories.
Andrea Lynn "Annie" Kritcher is an American nuclear engineer and physicist who works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She was responsible for the development of Hybrid-E, a capsule that enables inertial confinement fusion. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022.
Maria Gatu Johnson is a Swedish-American plasma physicist whose research involves the use of neutron spectrometry to study inertial confinement fusion and stellar nucleosynthesis. She works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a principal research scientist in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center.