Plasma Physics / Fusion Colloquium with Dr. Mark B. Chadwick, Los Alamos National Lab

Speaker: Dr. Mark B. Chadwick, Los Alamos National Lab

Title: "Fusion’s Surprising History--and Its Unfinished Future"

Abstract: 

An overlooked experiment, a remarkably favorable nuclear resonance, and the challenge of controlling a burning plasma: fusion’s history offers lessons for its future. This talk traces that history from early ideas about the energy source of stars and a little-known 1938 observation of deuterium–tritium fusion at the University of Michigan to discoveries at Los Alamos that helped establish the foundations of fusion research.

Drawing on recent historical investigations, I will describe how experiments revealed the unusually large deuterium–tritium fusion cross section, why its underlying nuclear resonance matters, and how precision measurements and nuclear theory continue to underpin fusion predictions. I will then connect these foundations to contemporary challenges: plasma disruptions, neutron damage to materials, predictive simulation, and emerging uses of artificial intelligence. Developments in magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, and pulsed-power fusion provide the setting for discussing the opportunities—and substantial remaining challenges—of commercial fusion energy.

Throughout, the emphasis will be on scientific surprises, the interplay of experiment and computation, and the open problems that the next generation of researchers can help solve.

Bio: 

Dr. Mark B. Chadwick is the Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation, Computing & Theory (ALDSCT) at Los Alamos, advancing the high-performance computing, algorithms, and theoretical science that underpin national security missions and AI and quantum discovery science. He previously served as interim Los Alamos Deputy Director for Science, Technology & Engineering. Chadwick has worked across Los Alamos’ Science, Technology & Engineering and Weapons organizations for more than three decades. He has led the US nuclear data evaluation collaboration Evaluated Nuclear Data Files, creating the world’s highest-fidelity databases used worldwide in radiation transport codes, including the Laboratory’s Monte Carlo N-Particle code. 

Chadwick has also published technical nuclear history books on fission and fusion during the Manhattan Project and H-bomb invention era. He is a Los Alamos Laboratory Fellow, and an APS and ANS Fellow.