MSEE Seminar: Tim Collins & Petros Tzeferacos, “Modeling for HED and Fusion research at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics”

Please contact Veronica Turner for connection information.

Established 52 years ago in 1970 as a major center for the investigation of the interaction of intense laser radiation with matter, the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) is a unique and key participant in NNSA’s HED science program. The LLE operates two of the largest lasers at any academic institution in the world to support the HED community In advancing laser technologies, fusion, and general HED sciences. In this talk, we present an overview the LLE science program and highlight examples of current research projects, with emphasis on efforts to develop and validate computational tools for HED research. We focus on the development of advanced multi-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic codes, in collaboration with the Flash Center for Computational Science, as well as physics-specific codes to model material properties, magnetized HED, and laser-plasma interactions.

Tim Collins is a senior scientist at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He received his bachelor’s degree in Physics from Oberlin College, and his Ph.D. (1997) in Astrophysics at the University of Rochester. His thesis was supervised by Professors Hugh M. Van Horn and H. Lawrence Helfer, on the topic of accretion disks surrounding white-dwarf stars in cataclysmic variable (CV) binary star systems. In addition to work on CV’s, his research has included investigation of neutron star oscillations, supernova 1987A, equation-of-state modeling for inertial confinement fusion (ICF), shock propagation in DT-saturated foams, beam-smoothing requirements for ICF, MJ-class ICF target design for laser-direct drive, and fast-electron preheat.

Petros Tzeferacos received his degree in Physics from the Physics Department of the University of Athens, Greece, in 2006, and earned his Ph.D. in Physics and Astrophysics from the Physics Department of the University of Turin, Italy, in 2010. His doctoral research was on jet-launching mechanisms in astrophysical accretion disks. From 2010-2012 he was a postdoc at the Department of Physics of the University of Turin, where he worked on accretion disk dynamics, numerical methods for computational astrophysics, and the development of the astrophysics code PLUTO. In 2012 he joined as a postdoc the Flash Center for Computational Science at the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics of the University of Chicago. There he became Research Assistant Professor in 2013 and Research Associate Professor in 2019.