ASLMS 2024 Keynote Speaker
Mordecai D. ("Mordy") Rosen, PhD
We are pleased to announce the keynote speaker for ASLMS 2024, Mordecai D. ("Mordy") Rosen, PhD, an acclaimed plasma physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), winner of the Teller Medal of the American Nuclear Society for his role in establishing the field of High Energy Density Physics, and twice the winner of the APS Excellence in Plasma Physics in
Research Award, in 1990 for designing the world's first laboratory x-ray laser and in 2022 for the team achieving a burning plasma.
In 2022, the lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved fusion ignition, a major advance for the future of carbon-free, inherently safe fusion energy production.
Plenary | Thursday, April 11, 2024
| 8:00 AM – 8:45 AM EDT
Presentation Title: Igniting a Star With the World’s Largest Laser, a History-Making Achievement
Presentation Summary: On December 5, 2022, a spherical capsule, containing fusion fuel of heavy hydrogen, was imploded to high density and temperature. It then ignited, producing, for the first time in history, more fusion energy than the laser energy driving it. That laser, the world's largest, is the National Ignition Facility [NIF] at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. It illuminated the interior of a cylinder of gold encompassing that capsule, and in so doing, created a 3-million-degree x-ray oven that drove the capsule implosion. Upon implosion the fuel reached a temperature of 100 million degrees, exceeding the temperature at the center of our Sun by a factor of ~ ten. In this talk we briefly describe how all this was done, and its implications for a possible future of carbon-free, inherently safe, fusion energy production.