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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 24, 2003
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), currently under construction at the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a stadium-sized facility containing a 192-beam, 1.8-Megajoule, 500-Terawatt, 351-nm laser system together with a 10-meter diameter target chamber with room for nearly 100 experimental diagnostics. NIF is being built by the National Nuclear Security Administration and when completed will be the world's largest laser experimental system, providing a national center to study inertial confinement fusion and the physics of matter at extreme energy densities and pressures. NIF's 192 energetic laser beams will compress fusion targets to conditions where they will ignite and burn, liberating more energy than required to initiate the fusion reactions. NIF experiments will allow the study of physical processes at temperatures approaching 100 million K and 100 billion times atmospheric pressure. These conditions exist naturally only in the interior of stars and in nuclear weapons explosions. In the course of designing the world's most energetic laser system, a number of significant technology breakthroughs have been achieved. This talk will provide a detailed look at NIF's laser systems, the results of recent laser commissioning shots, and plans for commissioning diagnostics for experiments on NIF.
Dr. George H. Miller has been an Associate Director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1985 and was appointed Associate Director for National Ignition Facility programs in 2000. He had previously served, in 1989, with the Department of Energy as Special Scientific Advisor on Weapons Activities to Secretary of Energy Admiral James D. Watkins; and in 1996 at Lawrence Livermore he assumed the Associate Directorship for National Security, providing leadership for the Laboratory's national security programs, including nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship; non-proliferation, arms control, and international security; and support to DoD programs. In his early years at Lawrence Livermore, Dr. Miller served as a physicist in the Laboratory's nuclear weapons design divisions, including service as design physicist and project leader for nuclear events and bomb development. This led ultimately to his appointment as Deputy Associate Director for Nuclear Design in 1984, a position that brought familiarity with large, powerful lasers. Dr. Miller received the B.S. (with high honors), MS, and PhD degrees, all in physics, from the College of William and Mary. He is a member of the American Physical Society and Sigma Pi Sigma (the National Physics Honor Society), and a number of scientific advisory panels related to national defense issues. He has received Fellowship awards from the National Science Foundation, Gulf General Atomics, and others.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Jim Heaney
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov