The 15th Omega Laser Facility Users Group (OLUG) Workshop, held on April 16–18, 2024 at the Bloch Alumni Advancement Center and Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), attracted over 170 participants, including 64 students and 44 postdoc and early-career researchers, from 39 institutions. The annual workshop facilitates a continuing dialog among individual users and between users and the facility management. It also provides opportunities for students and young researchers to present their work in an interactive yet informal setting to foster collaboration and networking.
A broad range of user-focused topics was covered over the course of three days: high-energy-density (HED) science talks by Omega users including four by PhD students, a joint poster session, three Findings and Recommendations sessions (F&Rs), target discussions, an evening tutorial on facility requirements and best practices for users when designing and preparing their experiments, a young researchers forum, workforce developments, a community DEIA discussion, career and training opportunities in HED science, LLE Director’s remarks, perspectives from federal funding agencies and programs, Omega facility and user program updates, a talk on the NSF OPAL design project, and a tour of the facility.
The OLUG community submitted 28 F&Rs to facility management and of the 67 total poster presentations during the workshop, 56 were given by students and postdocs. Ten Best Posters were awarded to undergraduate students Noah Harley and Chunsun Lei (Houghton University); Kevin Cerda, Dylan Christopherson, and Shoshanna Hertz (SUNY Geneseo); and Ann Truong (UCSD); graduate students Justin Kunimune (MIT), Kasper Moczulski (University of Rochester), Tristan Bachmann (University of Rochester), and Matthew Cufari (MIT); and postdoctoral researchers Heath LeFevre (University of Michigan), Michael Wadas (University of Michigan), and Victor Tranchant (University of Rochester).
This OLUG workshop is made possible in part by support from the National Nuclear Security Administration for travel expenses of students and postdocs, and by the generous sponsorships from Luxel Corporation, Prism Computational Sciences, Inc., and Sydor Technologies.
