Please join ND Energy for a virtual distinguished lecture featuring Dr. Andrea “Annie” L. Kritcher Ph.D., an esteemed researcher and visionary at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) who designed the first ever fusion ignition experiment. In this talk, Dr. Kritcher will discuss the design of the first experiment to achieve fusion target gain >1 and the details surrounding the results and major advancements in fusion energy. All members of the Notre Dame research community and general public are invited to attend. Questions may be directed to Dr. Subhash L. Shinde, Associate Director of ND Energy.
Registration
Registraion is required to receive a personal Zoom link enabling you to join the virtual presentation. Please register at the link below by November 7.
Abstract
The inertial fusion community have been working towards ignition for decades, since the idea of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) was first proposed by Nuckolls, et al., in 1972. On August 8, 2021 and Dec 5 th 2022, the Lawson criterion for ignition was met and more fusion energy was created than laser energy incident on the target at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Northern California. The first experiment produced a fusion yield of 1.35 MJ from 1.9 MJ of laser energy and appears to have crossed the tipping-point of thermodynamic instability according to several ignition metrics. Building on this result, improvements were made to increase the fusion energy output to ~4MJ from 2.05 MJ of laser energy on target, resulting in target gain exceeding unity for the first time in the laboratory. This result is important in that it proves that there is nothing fundamentally limiting controlled fusion energy gain in the laboratory. The presentation will detail the changes made to achieve this result.
Biography
Dr. Annie Kritcher is the integrated modeling team lead within the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program and the lead designer on Hybrid-E experiments, which recently achieved >3 MJ fusion yield and first ever fusion target gain in a laboratory, at LLNL. She is also a group leader within the design physics division line organization.
Kritcher earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and her B.S. from the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences department at the University of Michigan. She was first employed at LLNL as a summer intern in 2004, then as an LLNL Lawrence Scholar from 2005-2009 during her thesis at UC Berkeley, as a Lawrence postdoctoral fellow in 2009 following completion of her Ph.D, then as a member of the technical staff in 2012. Kritcher started out at LLNL in experimental physics measuring the plasma conditions of high energy density matter and studying nuclear plasma interactions. She then transitioned to design staff during her career appointment, where she designed the first fusion ignition and target gain experiment ever achieved in a laboratory. She won the John Dawson award for her work in creating a burning plasma in 2022.
Kritcher is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.
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Originally published at energy.nd.edu.