52nd DPP,  Part I

Posted by Rezwan on Nov 30, 2010 at 01:20 AM
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You may recall from our tweets and events calendar that Nov. 8-12 was the APS‘s 52nd DPP meeting (“DPP”). 

The event was attended by more than a thousand plasma physicists and boasted hundreds of sessions and speakers.  By way of a disclaimer you should know I’m not a plasma physicist.  As a civilian in this crowd, I sense missed a lot of what was going on around me, and wasn’t able to zero in on what would be most relevant to the Focus Fusion endeavor.  I apologize for that.  In any case, here are some of my impressions. 

3rd HEDSA High Energy Density Laboratory Plasma (“HEDLP”) Symposium

The HEDSA (”High Energy Density Science Association”) proceedings began on Sunday, Nov. 7.  This was one of many satellite meetings separate from the DPP annual meeting events, thus it isn’t listed on the APS-DPP website. 

The meeting was organized by Dr. Farhat Beg of UCSD and began with Dr. Don Cook, Deputy Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration (“NNSA”) speaking about “The NNSA perspective of the future of HEDLP.”  His talk will eventually be posted here.

Don spoke about the importance of HEDSA for deterrence and how we have to “change and modernize as America’s deterrent”.  He spoke about stewardship and his policy preferences.  Yes, this is the part where plasma physics plays a role in keeping America’s nuclear weapons stockpile healthy and strong.  After his talk of deterrence and stockpiles and stewardship it seemed that the following speakers had little to say on those topics and were more interested in culture change, mission change, and the science itself, as you will eventually see when they post their talks.  

In any case, what stood out for me was the second speaker, Professor Adam Frank, University of Rochester.  His talk was “The Perfect Storm: Jets and Heterogeneous Flows in Laboratory Astrophysics”.  He also co-authored Laboratory experiments of supersonic flows through clumpy environments and Experimental studies of radiatively cooled supersonic plasma jets produced in wire array z-pinches.

Utterly fascinating physics, I’m sure, but what stuck out for me was the part where he spoke of making progress in getting astronomers to see that phenomenon in plasmas in space can be reproduced in the lab.  He suggested that he was having some success with this, and put it in terms of getting astrophysicists and plasma physicists to speak the same language.  This sentiment echoes Eric Lerner’s BBNH, which laments the divide between the two.  It’s nice to know that progress is being made in the bridge between experimental plasma physics and astrophysics.  That and the scalability of plasma kinks in space highlighted the usefulness of collaborations.

Per Eric, It turns out that LPPX’s current emphasis on plasma kinking also links with considerable work being done on solar flares.  Solar flares have great practical importance as they can produce substorms that destroy satellites, knock out communications and energy grids, etc. 

Back to HEDSA - I realize I am out of my comfort zone.  Fortunately, Dr. Dave Hammer, HEDSA member and Cornell University professor was kind enough to give me a copy of the “Basic Research needs for High Energy Density Laboratory Physics”.  In other words, the HEDLP ReNeW book.  I can’t find it online yet, but for now, here’s a powerpoint on the topic. 

Alfven Waves

Monday Morning, Walter Gekelman of UCLA gave a talk and 3-D show of The Many Faces of the Alfven Wave.

This was stunning, and I’m going to have to extract some of his alfven wave films and imagery and embed it into our site.