Jordan Lee, DHil Atomic and Laser Physics
I am a current DPhil student in Peter Norreys’ group after joining in October 2021. Prior to this, I graduated with a master’s degree in Maths and Physics from the University of Warwick, where I studied laser-plasma interactions and their impacts on inertial confinement fusion (ICF) implosions.
My current research focuses on high-gain ICF, operating in a relatively robust parameter space with reduced susceptibility to hydrodynamic and parametric instabilities. For these stable implosions to ignite, they typically need to be combined with an additional ignition phase. Fast ignition is a well-known example of the decoupling of the compression and ignition phases of an implosion. Alongside my work optimising fast ignition implosions, I have been working on a more novel auxiliary heating concept for igniting isobaric “hot spot” implosions. Both of these ignition concepts involve the use of energetic electrons generated by intense laser-plasma interactions, although the method of depositing their energy differs greatly between the collisional deposition found in fast ignition schemes and the collisionless coupling found in the auxiliary heating scheme. I have studied in detail the collective, collisionless process by which fast electrons deposit their energy in hot spot plasmas and have optimised electron beam parameters to maximise the efficiency of this interaction.
Most recently, I have spent a year with IBM Research, producing a simulation toolkit for inertial confinement fusion. This toolkit provides workflow orchestration, simplified data exchange between simulation codes, a Bayesian optimisation service, in situ visualisation of certain workflow elements, and containerised simulation codes for ease of portability between HPC systems. This toolkit has been developed for multi-scale simulations of inertial fusion implosions in hybrid cloud environments to aid the development and optimisation of ICF designs.
My work is largely computational, making use of hydrodynamic, particle-in-cell and Vlasov-Maxwell simulation codes to simulate ICF implosions and plasma instabilities across a wide range of scale lengths. Due to the computational nature of my research, I am a regular user of a range of UK HPC systems.
Email:
jordan.lee@physics.ox.ac.uk
Oxford Physics Page: https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/jordanlee