Quick Shot

Dr. Michael Rosenberg, a new staff member at LLE, has been selected to receive the prestigious Marshall Rosenbluth Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis given by the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics (DPP). The award citation states “for first experimental demonstration of the importance of kinetic and multi-ion effects on fusion rates in a wide class of inertial confinement fusion implosions, and for use of proton diagnostics to unveil new features of magnetic reconnection in laser-generated plasmas.” Rosenberg will receive the award at the APS DPP meeting in November. There are many aspects to Rosenberg’s thesis, but the most important and influential accomplishment was to discover, quantify, and document the existence and importance of kinetic and multi-ion effects in inertial confinement fusion plasmas and to clearly delineate the transition from the kinetic to the average-ion fluid description. His research was done at the Omega Laser Facility and the National Ignition Facility and leveraged techniques and instruments developed at the MIT High-Energy-Density Accelerator Facility. Rosenberg is presently at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), working with both LLE and LLNL colleagues on the Megajoule Direct-Drive Campaign (part of the national direct-drive program). Their goal is to understand laser–plasma interaction physics in the large hot plasma corona of ignition direct-drive targets.