Xinzhiyuan Report
EDIT: Sleepy Aeneas
[Introduction to Xinzhiyuan] The person in charge of the inertial confinement fusion project at LLNL Laboratory is a Chinese woman.
After more than half a century of research, scientists have finally made a breakthrough from 0 to 1 in inertial confinement fusion.
On December 13, the United States officially announced that the National Ignition Facility NIF built by LLNL has successfully achieved a net energy gain from nuclear fusion.
At the press conference, a Chinese female face caught everyone’s attention—Tammy Ma, one of the main leaders of the LLNL project (sitting on the far left of the table).
As early as this spring, the White House held a summit, saying that it would simultaneously advance the two projects of inertial confinement nuclear fusion and magnetic confinement reactor (tokamak).
When I heard the news that the ignition was successful, I burst into tears
Tammy Ma is the director of the Inertial Fusion Energy Institutional Initiative (inertial confinement nuclear fusion energy project), which is called IFE for short.
In the penal part of the press conference, Ma gave a detailed introduction to the IFE project.
She said that this project is of great significance to the development of clean energy, and at the same time, they also face great challenges in science and engineering.
Moreover, the members of the project are well aware that if they really achieve the net energy gain of a controlled nuclear fusion reaction, they will undoubtedly have made a monumental undertaking worthy of being recorded in the annals of history.
The success of the ‘ignition’ also shocked the entire physics community and made physicists all over the world boil. This not only means the release of fusion energy, but also shows that the door of new science is opening.
From the point of view of controllable nuclear fusion, it has almost no carbon emissions, and can allow humans to obtain free clean energy, and due to the abundant reserves of hydrogen in nature, the world’s energy crisis can be solved.
Of course, the original intention of the United States to do this is to provide the required data for the nuclear inventory research program (LLNL is a subsidiary of the US Nuclear Safety Administration), which is also an important reason why NIF is relatively ‘inefficient’.
The success of this experiment also allows the United States to maintain nuclear deterrence without conducting traditional nuclear tests.
Tammy Ma said she was completely unaware of the explosive incident. At the time, she was preparing to board a plane for the department’s annual meeting in DC to prepare for the next step in the fusion program.
At this moment, she received a call from her boss, who told her: Our controllable nuclear fusion ignition was successful (I think we got ignition)!
Tammy Ma burst into tears of joy. She was so happy that she jumped up on the spot, and the people in the waiting area looked at her in surprise.
Thinking of so many years of hard work, she couldn’t stop crying.
For her, National Ignition is a ‘dream department’. Over the years, she still gets goosebumps whenever she walks into the National Ignition Facility.
‘It’s been amazing to work here and I’m so proud of my team. ‘
Later, Tammy Ma said that the success of LLNL will undoubtedly greatly encourage other public and private institutions, and more institutions will boldly invest more funds and research strength to overcome more scientific research difficulties together with LLNL.
She also very much looks forward to working with these institutions to jointly realize the scale of inertial confinement fusion in the next few decades.
At present, the United States has made a lot of new progress in related technologies, such as materials science, competition and simulation, machine learning, etc. LLNL has adopted these new technologies, allowing NIF to have a new laser architecture and other advanced functions .
She recalls excitedly: The idea of laser-induced nuclear fusion was conceived by pioneering scientists at LLNL 60 years ago.
Scientists in the United States spent 60 years finally turning this idea into reality.
14 years at LLNL
A plasma physicist, Dr. Tammy Ma is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the High Intensity Laser High Energy Density (HED) Program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) and Photon Science Directorate. ) Science’s Advanced Photonic Technologies Program and serves as associate director of LLNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program.
In addition, she is a member of the Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee (FESAC), advising the DOE Office of Science on complex scientific and technical issues related to fusion energy and plasma research.
Since joining LLNL, she has led many inertial confinement fusion experiments at NIF, developed new X-ray analysis methods, and chaired the laboratory-wide LDRD program that funds highly innovative research.
The goal of these experiments is to ignite nuclear fusion by using NIF’s 192 laser beams to compress fuel capsules containing deuterium and tritium (isotopes of hydrogen), a process known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF).
The ultimate goal of the ICF is to achieve sustained thermonuclear fusion that releases many times more energy than is required to start the reaction.
Tammy Ma received her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Caltech in 2005, and her master’s and doctorate degrees from UC San Diego in 2008 and 2010, respectively.
After graduation, she came to LLNL for postdoctoral research and officially joined the faculty in 2012.
Currently, she has co-authored more than 185 journal papers.
Tammy Ma is the recipient of the 2013 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), and in 2016 received the Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contribution to Plasma Research, 2018 DOE Early Career Research Award, and 2021 Fusion Energy Association Excellence in Fusion Engineering Award.
She was also named the 2019 California 16th Assembly District Woman of the Year for her commitment to education, as well as mentoring and encouraging young students who share her passion for science.
experimental physicist who loves to buy shoes
In 2014, Tammy Ma gave an interview as an experimental physicist at the National Ignition Facility. The following is the content of the interview:
My mother immigrated to Canada as a teenager, so she didn’t have a chance to finish high school, let alone college. So my parents will always emphasize the importance of education to us.
But even so, they never put any pressure, just hope that we can find a career that we like, and at the same time lead a stable and comfortable life.
My brother and I are now physicists, and we are very, very passionate about what we do.
To be sure, science is particularly suited to my personality because it’s very straightforward and unemotional. It’s like doing math problems in school, there will always be one correct answer.
But to find the truth, not only does it take a lot of creativity, but it takes a lot of steps that you go wrong along the way.
Just like the ‘ignition’ we are studying, it is a very difficult and challenging problem.
Because we’ve never built anything this big to these crazy specifications before, or done physics at these densities, these temperatures, and these extremes.
We never blamed each other if something went wrong. It’s just physics after all, it’s nature, and that’s what we’re trying to figure out.
As an experimental physicist, I love being in the lab, setting up experiments on the computer and doing the analysis.
We would come up with an idea for an experiment together, and the designers would go and try to model it and see if it made sense, and then the experimenters would come up with a method and set it up on the NIF.
Once the setup is complete, we will start the experiment. Once the data comes back, we analyze it to try to understand and interpret the data.
Afterwards, we got together again to work out what might be next. It’s a continuous loop, but it’s fun.
What I want to say to young scientists or school students is that science is hard and challenging, and that’s what science is all about.
Sometimes, your grades may not be so ideal, your experiment may fail, and you may even want to switch to another easier topic or major.
But if you like science, by all means stick with it.
Finally, she also mentioned her own way to reduce stress: go shopping.
I would leave the office and walk around. Look at this, touch that, and buy a few more pairs of shoes.
Speaking of shoes, I currently have 58 pairs and that doesn’t count flip flops.
You know, I’m a California girl. I wore flip-flops throughout my college career.
The following little story can tell you how much they like flip flops:
References:
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