Exploring the potential: a high energy density pulsed power device as a UK R&D platform

Dame Julie Maxton is the Executive Director of the Royal Society, the first woman in 350 years to hold the post. Before taking up her position at the Royal Society in 2011 Julie was Registrar at the University of Oxford, the first woman in 550 years in the role.

She is an Honorary Fellow of University College Oxford, a Bencher of the Middle Temple, a Freeman of the Goldsmith’s Company and a Board member of Sense about Science. In the past she has also been on the Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford, Haberdasher Aske’s School (Elstree), Engineering UK, Charities Aid Foundation and The Faraday Institute.

Originally trained as a barrister at the Middle Temple, Julie combined a career as a practising lawyer with that of an academic, holding a number of senior academic positions, including those of Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Academic and other recognition Julie has received include a CBE (2017) and Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Huddersfield, Warwick, Canterbury, Hull and Bristol.

She is the author of several books and numerous articles concerned with trusts, equity, commercial and property law.

Professor Paul Monks is the Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). As BEIS CSA, he delivers independent and impartial scientific advice to Ministers and policy makers across the BEIS portfolio.  The BEIS CSA portfolio spans a wide range of policy areas, including energy (such as nuclear (fission and fusion), geothermal and hydrogen), climate change, electric vehicles, medical radionuclides, space and national security. His role also covers advising on current and ongoing issues faced by UK businesses and industry, with recent focus on the critical role of science in supporting sustainable, resilient and measurable Net Zero and the challenges of delivering national and global decarbonisation.

Professor Paul Monks also works closely with the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, other Departmental CSAs, and BEIS Chief Economist, to strengthen the links within and across departments, encouraging effective engagement and knowledge sharing, and to support delivery of a robust evidence base to underpin BEIS policy decisions.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as an active member of COVID-19 SAGE, and as co-chair of SAGE-EMG subgroup, Professor Paul Monks has also input to developing and improving understanding of the impacts of the pandemic, including on events such as weddings, nightclubs and festivals, and advised on the development and evolution of public guidelines.

Prior to joining the department, Professor Paul Monks was Pro-Vice Chancellor and Head of College of Science and Engineering at the University of Leicester, where he remains a Professor in Atmospheric Chemistry and Earth Observation Science.  

Nick’s research into fusion began in 2007 as part of his master's thesis, where he worked at the University of Oxford with Yiannis Ventikos. This work continued into a DPhil, where he performed hydrodynamic simulations of shock-driven cavity collapse. These simulations showed that cavity collapse leads to inertial confinement of the gas inside the cavity and revealed that extreme states of matter could be reached, possibly entering the regime for fusion. To explore the concept of energy generation via this process, Nick and Yiannis co-founded First Light Fusion Ltd in 2011. 

Nick also spent three years tutoring at Lady Margaret Hall during his studies. After finishing his DPhil in 2012, Nick joined First Light Fusion as CEO and CTO, and continues to oversee the technical vision of the company. 

Sergey Lebedev is a Professor of Plasma Physics and a Head of Plasma Physics Group at Imperial College London. His research at the MAGPIE pulsed power facility concentrates on the physics of high energy density plasmas, including laboratory astrophysics experiments, physics of wire array z-pinches and plasma diagnostics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2004) and of the Institute of Physics (2005). 

Dr. Daniel Sinars is the Director for the Pulsed Power Sciences Center, which is best known for conducting research on the world’s most powerful pulsed power machine, the 26 MA, 80-TW, 22 MJ “Z” facility. The Z facility is used for a wide range of high energy density physics science, the study of matter and radiation at extreme pressures (>1 million times atmospheric pressure). Daniel is also the Sandia Executive for the Inertial Confinement Fusion and Science programs of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Center manages a combined annual budget of >$150M and has about 300 employees. The Center also operates several additional facilities, including the multi-kJ, 2-TW Z-Beamlet laser facility adjacent to Z, the STAR gas gun facilities, and a variety of smaller pulsed power machines.  

Daniel joined Sandia in 2001 after receiving a PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University, and a B.S. in Engineering Physics from the University of Oklahoma in 1996. He has made extensive contributions to inertial confinement fusion, high energy density science, and z-pinch physics research, with over 130 refereed journal publications in these fields (26 as first author) and an h-index of 46 (Elsevier Scopus). Daniel’s contributions were recognized in 2007 with an IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Early Achievement Award, and in 2011 with both a Department of Energy Early Career Research Program Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in September 2015. Daniel was honored with the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 2022, which recognizes mid-career U.S. scientists and engineers who have advanced new research and scientific discovery supporting the Department of Energy and is one of the longest-running and most prestigious science and technology awards bestowed by the U.S. Government. 

Professor Rose joined Imperial College in 2006 and since then has undertaken several roles at Imperial including the Head of Plasma Physics and the Vice-Dean of Natural Sciences. He has worked in plasma physics for all of his career, with a particular emphasis on plasmas produced using high-power lasers. He spent much of that time at the two high-power laser facilities in the UK: the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory’s Central Laser Facility where he became the Associate Director for Physics and at AWE Aldermaston where he was the Head of Plasma Physics. 

Yitzhak Maron received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann, and as a research Associate at the Laboratory of Plasma Studies at Cornell University. As a Professor in the Faculty of Physics of the WIS, he has been heading the Plasma Laboratory there. His Laboratory focuses on spectroscopic investigations of high-energy-density plasmas, together with developing kinetics, line-shape, and radiation-transport computations. His laboratory conducts broad international collaborations, and hosts worldwide students and researchers. He is an APS Fellow (1995), an IEEE Fellow (2003), the recipient of the IEEE PSAC Award (2007), and the sole recipient of the American Physical Society John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research for 2009. 

Dr Robbie Scott is a Senior Plasma Physicist, in the Central Laser Facility, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). Initially studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh he graduated in 2001. After working as a design engineer in the oil industry for 2 years, he joined RAL to lead a team in the project management, design, manufacturing, and commissioning of the target assembly for the £300M ISIS Target Station 2 neutron spallation source. Inspired by advances in Inertial Fusion Energy, he started his plasma physics PhD at Imperial College London in 2007, studying experimental and numerical aspects of fast ignition laser inertial fusion. From 2011-2012 he spent a year as a visiting scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) working on the National Ignition Campaign at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Here he made key discoveries regarding the pivotal role of low-mode implosion asphericity in implosion energetics. Returning to the Central Laser Facility in 2012, Scott now works principally Laser Direct Drive inertial fusion, much of which is performed collaboratively with UK universities and US labs. His work combines numerical modelling, experiments on the Omega laser facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics and NIF, and code development. Recently he has pioneered a new ‘Shock Augmented Ignition’ approach to Laser Inertial Fusion, which forms the basis of close collaborative experiments on NIF with the aim of demonstrating fusion energy gain. He sits on numerous international panels including as Chair of the UK Inertial Fusion Consortium, NIF User Executive Committee, European Physical Society Beam Plasma and Inertial Fusion Board, UK Fusion Advisory Board, The Fusion Cluster, Laboratory for Laser Energetics: Laboratory Basic Science Facilities Access Panel Member, HiPER+: Advisory Board Member LaserLab Europe: ICF/IFE Expert Group Panel Member, DOE Office of Science Inertial Fusion Energy Basic Research Needs Workshop: Panel Lead. 

Dr Kate Lancaster is a lecturer and programme leader for the Msc in Fusion Energy, based at the York Plasma Institute, part of the physics department at the University of York. She received her PhD in 2005 in Advanced Fast Ignition Studies from Imperial College whilst based in Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. A post-doctoral position was followed by a permanent research position at the Central Laser Facility, before coming to the York Plasma Institute in 2012. Her research expertise is in ultra-intense laser-plasma interactions and is based around understanding the absorption of those lasers and the subsequent transport of the energy. She specifically is interested in the role the electrons play in this and how we can manipulate and control them to heat matter, which is relevant for alternative laser driven fusion schemes and creating warm/hot dense matter. She is also interested in the study and understanding of such matter once it has been produced. Kate has been very active in the communication of science for many years. She has spoken to tens of thousands of people at many events, festivals, and schools and has appeared as an expert on both television and radio, mainly speaking about lasers, plasmas, and fusion. She gave a prestigious Friday Evening Discourse at The Royal Institution in 2015 on “The Extreme World of Ultra Intense Lasers”, which has subsequently received over 260,000 views on YouTube. Recently Kate was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 show In our time talking about plasma. This show has a listenership of ~2.5 million with a further ~2 million podcast downloads.

Stephanie Hansen is a computational physicist who studies the atomic-scale behavior of atoms in extreme environments relevant to stellar astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion. She has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications and is the principal author of a spectroscopy code that is used around the world to interpret x-ray emission from laboratory and astrophysical plasmas. She holds degrees in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Nevada, Reno, began her physics career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and is presently a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and a Visiting Associate Professor at Cornell University. She received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2017, was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics in 2019, chaired the APS-DPP Women in Plasma Physics Committee from 2018-2020, and has served on scientific advisory councils and committees for the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Rob joined AWE, in the Design Mathematics Department, in 1995 after studying Physics at Imperial College London. Having arrived shortly after the UK ended nuclear testing in 1992, the focus of his research has been in the fields of Comprehensive Testing Ban Treaty (CTBT) compliant science-based stockpile stewardship. In particular, the development and application of multi-physics computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms and software to study extreme plasma conditions and high-pressure hydrodynamic phenomena. At AWE Rob studied, part-time, for a PhD in Applied Mathematics, again at Imperial College (2007). Since 2011 Rob has held various senior positions within the Physics area at AWE and in 2020 he was appointed to the role of Head of Physics at AWE. 

Professor Pickard’s research helps the modern scientist “see” and discover the universe at the atomic scale through Quantum Mechanics – from the centres of giant exoplanets, to pharmaceutical compounds, new battery materials and high temperature superconductors.

He is the inaugural Sir Alan Cottrell Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, University of Cambridge.

Previously he was Professor of Physics, University College London, and Reader in Physics, University of St Andrews. He has held EPSRC Advanced and Leadership Research Fellowships, and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

He is a lead developer of the widely used CASTEP computer code, and introduced both the GIPAW approach to the prediction of magnetic resonance parameters and Ab Initio Random Structure Searching (AIRSS). CASTEP has provided a significant source of licensing income for Cambridge Enterprise for over 20 years, while his AIRSS software is freely available through an open source license.

In 2015 he won the Rayleigh Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics, awarded for distinguished research in theoretical, mathematical or computational physics.