Trinity-led Physics team sheds new light on the properties of dense plasmas |
An international collaboration led by Trinity Physics Fellow Professor Justin Wark, reported this week on controlled studies of the atomic properties of extremely hot, dense matter which have overthrown a widely accepted 50-year-old model.
The results will benefit a wide range of fields, from research aimed at tapping nuclear fusion as an energy source to understanding the inner workings of stars. The team's work was performed on the world's first X-ray laser, based at Stanford, California (which is a billion times brighter than any other X-ray source on the planet). The results were published this week in Physical Review Letters, one of the world's top journals (see http://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/88). Their significance was highlighted by the editorial summarising the results (see http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i6/e065002).
A further report on this important research can be found at the Stanford website (https://news.slac.stanford.edu/press-release/extreme-plasma-theories-put-test).
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