WEBVTT

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I guess I'll say

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Ryan David McBride: Okay. So Mark, so I take it away. Then

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Mark Kushner: Yes.

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Ryan David McBride: Okay. So, hello everyone I'm Ryan McBride from the University of Michigan's department of nuclear engineering and radiological sciences, and I'm very happy to introduce to you today, Dr. Sarah Nelson from the NSA

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Ryan David McBride: Dr. Nelson is a nuclear and radio chemist. She's the Deputy Director of the Office of experimental science for the end and essays office of defense programs.

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Ryan David McBride: She earned her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara and her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Ryan David McBride: Where she studied odd Z transact tonight compound nucleus reactions, including the discovery of a new isotope of the new isotope for him to 16

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Ryan David McBride: Prior to joining an NSA

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Ryan David McBride: Dr. Nelson was the Roger. Roger. But cell Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she was working on nuclear chemistry diagnostics development for the National Ignition Facility, as well as for nuclear systems for domestic counterterrorism applications.

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Ryan David McBride: And during this work, she was the co discoverer of 14 new transact and I'd isotopes.

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Ryan David McBride: Dr. Nelson was also selected as a Christine mercy in science and technology policy fellow at the National Academies in 2012

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Ryan David McBride: And then prior to joining NSA Dr. Nelson was also with the Pacific Northwest National Lab on assignment with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, otherwise known as D TRA or did

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Ryan David McBride: She has received numerous awards, including the director's award.

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Ryan David McBride: And the DVR ever you

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Daniel Carpenter: Feel for what you want.

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Ryan David McBride: Sorry, from the DT era us strat comm center for combating weapons of mass destruction.

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Ryan David McBride: Also deliver the Lawrence Livermore National Labs excellence and publication award and basic, basic science and the Gordon Battelle prize for scientific discovery.

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Ryan David McBride: Dr. Nelson gives excellent talks and I've always enjoyed hearing your presentations at the NSA is SAP symposia and other venues. So I think we're in for a real treat.

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Ryan David McBride: So with that, I would like to eat present Dr. Nelson with the cherished beloved an extremely valuable Mitzi mug. So, here you go.

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Sarah Nelson: Thanks, Ryan.

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Ryan David McBride: Alright, so with that.

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Ryan David McBride: Take it away. Dr. Nelson.

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Sarah Nelson: All right, thank you so much. Ryan, Professor Kushner and Julia everyone who's in attendance. I'm so surprised and flattered that there's such high attendance right now.

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Sarah Nelson: I hope you all enjoy. Oh my gosh, there's 80 people here. So I'm going to share my screen and let you go see this talk, and we will get underway. How's that coming across. We were looking good.

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Ryan David McBride: Looks good.

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Sarah Nelson: All right, so, um, so, Ryan just gave me a very flattering introduction. And so my talk today is entitled lasers, the punches and the importance of plasma physics to the NSA or National Nuclear Security Administration.

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Sarah Nelson: For those undergrads in the audience who are interested in applying for various fellowships, we are not an agency with the A's administration that's look for so pro tip number one. So you also see in parentheses there on detailed to na

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Sarah Nelson: Something I've been talking to a couple of people about today during my meetings is that I've very recently, in the last few weeks or so.

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Sarah Nelson: Taken an assignment. So I am on loan from my role as Deputy Director in the office of experimental sciences to any 19. And for those of you who don't speak on an essay and I doubt that many of you would that is

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Sarah Nelson: The Office of production modernization and that includes all of the different parts that would go into a nuclear weapon from the Nuclear Non nuclear electronics. So I'm I am the

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Sarah Nelson: Senior Technical Advisor now with them for a short period of time, which is really exciting. So without further ado, oops, how do we advance this

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Sarah Nelson: Doo doo doo. There we go.

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Sarah Nelson: There's me before I get underway. I want to help start the to think that people that helped make this happen because I have

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Sarah Nelson: liberally borrowed or stolen a lot of slides from a lot of people, and that includes people at headquarters

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Sarah Nelson: in JAMA Frazier, the head of the Office of experimental science, Brian Sims team lead Paul Davis for you guys know from the UCF community.

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Sarah Nelson: Livermore lab at Los Alamos lab specifically Sean Finnegan because he actually made probably 10 of the slides that you see in this presentation today. They're fantastic

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Sarah Nelson: A lot of folks at Sandia including damn sinners. Greg Rocco my Cuneo Matt Gomez. There's probably someone I forgotten the think at Le who provided some material and thank you to

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Sarah Nelson: University of Michigan. Michigan State again, Professor Kushner, Julia Falco, which came for the invitation and the multiple email prods to get me to turn in my stuff. So thank you for that.

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Sarah Nelson: So about me. Ryan already read off a lot about my background.

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Sarah Nelson: I don't think that there is anything here that is outside of what Ryan read in my bio statement. Just as a note, this talk is completely unclassified

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Sarah Nelson: I I'll make a few call outs to interesting weapons things in there. There are a few there's a few graphics that folks might find interesting but nothing, nothing too interesting. I'm afraid so.

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Sarah Nelson: Moving along, um, so my background Ryan mentioned that I'm actually, I'm not a plasma physicist, I am a nuclear and radio chemist and I got to do some really cool stuff.

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Sarah Nelson: When I was in grad school and doing my postdoc, and one of those things was participating in the experiments into Russia for some time.

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Sarah Nelson: That led to the discovery of element 117 which we now know as Tennessee. That was a huge international collaboration.

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Sarah Nelson: You see a shot here from the PRL that that was published, which ended up being the cover story for that issue. So I've gotten a chance to participate in some really great science. And this was actually with Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

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Sarah Nelson: So there's a lot of really great basic research that goes on.

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Sarah Nelson: At the labs, as well as applied research and here's this picture of me in the Wayback Machine. This is from about 2009 I happy postdoc sitting on top of the zebra.

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Sarah Nelson: Generator at University of Nevada Reno, Nevada terawatt facility. I said, I'm not a plasma physicist and this is probably the closest I ever got. You see that little thing in my hand. That was one of the devices that I was using to try and investigate

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Sarah Nelson: Debris collection in as a pinch. For those of you who are familiar with the punches you know that they create a huge. It's a very violent environment.

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Sarah Nelson: There's a lot of energy discharged and and debris just flies all over the place. You really have to protect your, your optics and your diagnostics, but there was a question for for Nick because

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Sarah Nelson: Nick is used for a number of applications. And would we be able to observe the, the reaction products in a solid form after the shot. And so here you see on

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Sarah Nelson: The left side. Some arrow gels is or silicon and, oh, I forgot what the composition of the

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Sarah Nelson: Opaque arrow gel is there the white one on the right image, but those are some silicon wafers. We use as witness plates to try to basically

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Sarah Nelson: Identify reaction products from a cylindrical see pinch implosion. And here you can see the aftershock of what what there is there and

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Sarah Nelson: We were familiar with z, you're like, wow, that's really clean. I'll show you a picture what Z looks like on the inside. After, after Z shot and this is

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Sarah Nelson: This is remarkably clean but I also have little arrows pointing all the bits and pieces that I that I blew up and there are shrapnel all over the

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Sarah Nelson: The chamber here and and you say, well, Sarah, why, why is this important, why do you care. Here's some of the splatter debris that was later studied. You can see the

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Sarah Nelson: The, the size financial here that's 100 micron bar there. So these are all these are all small

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Sarah Nelson: Then you see this little guy right here is actually this guy right here. And the reason that that was highlighted is because we made the cylindrical wire arrays out of

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Sarah Nelson: Materials that you wouldn't otherwise find in the zebra target chamber, like we had silver wires. We had gold wires things that also wouldn't be liberated from the load hardware and

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Sarah Nelson: By being able to locate those and identify them separately, which is something that you want to find in a nuclear reaction product from an IV shot, we thought, well, maybe we can understand

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Sarah Nelson: How these debris are are collected and what's the best way to collect these. Can we can we analyze these. Is there a velocity distribution. Is there a size distribution just understanding how these debris are emitted and these were actually identified through SEM and

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Sarah Nelson: EDS spectroscopy. So we, we definitely knew that this was what we were looking for. So

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Sarah Nelson: Okay. Well, I did that stuff that's a little bit of the background and the some of the relevant research for today's talk, and you're going to say.

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Sarah Nelson: Okay, Sarah, that's great. But what does this have to do stockpile stewardship. I thought you're going to be talking to me about stockpile stewardship, or why I'm really virtually here today.

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Sarah Nelson: And that is the history of stockpile science based on how stewardship is this so many of you know that in

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Sarah Nelson: The early 90s, the United States stopped testing nuclear weapons. A lot of this was done underground at the Nevada test site we tested around 1000 devices, there have been treaties that have been cyber not ratified, such as the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or CT VT.

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Sarah Nelson: And in 1990s, the Department of Energy, or do we created the science based stockpile stewardship program, sometimes referred to as SSP

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Sarah Nelson: To maintain the safety, security and reliability of our US nuclear deterrent and that is our US nuclear stockpile without full scale system testing. So you have this great picture of

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Sarah Nelson: A mushroom cloud. I apologize. I don't know what what shot. That is, but I could probably look that up. If someone was interested

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Sarah Nelson: So in words stockpile stewardship program is designed to increase our confidence in the annual assessment of the safety, security and reliability of the stockpile.

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Sarah Nelson: We want to ensure that

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Sarah Nelson: No one ever wants to see these used an anchor. Right. But should the should not be necessary. It is the President's authority to to use one and

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Sarah Nelson: We need to as as the Department of Energy ensure to the President that these are safe, secure and reliable unfortunately if needed. So this happens every year.

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Sarah Nelson: And we have to provide that technical basis because we can't test. We have to provide that technical basis to the President on an annual basis or determine if there's a technical need to resume nuclear testing and so far.

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Sarah Nelson: Since the cessation of nuclear testing that has we have not gone back to to doing any full scale testing.

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Sarah Nelson: So over the past decade, our policies included new nuclear testing known new weapon development. We don't have any new weapons produce since 1991 and there's limited production capability for re manufacturing items and components.

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Sarah Nelson: That we do work with our partners in closely with the god because they are would be the there. They are the military and the ultimate users with such a such a device.

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Sarah Nelson: So for those of you have seen me give a talk at Oleg the Omega laser user group. You may have seen a different red car and in the place of this slide, but

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Sarah Nelson: I thought, I thought I'd snazzy up a little bit with an Alfa Romeo instead of the old Corvette and and this is this is stuff. How stewardship in in one picture.

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Sarah Nelson: Think a really high end sports car like really expensive finely tuned finely balanced finally operating, but you've got it in your garage go hot. Great. I'm going to go drive it but you can't

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Sarah Nelson: You can't drive that thing for 20 or 30 years but you can't change the tires. You can't change out the engine.

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Sarah Nelson: Maybe you get to an oil change, but you can't change out anything else. So when you're allowed in 30 years to put the key in its startup that fine automobile, is it going to run

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Sarah Nelson: Is it going to, or is it going to like limp out of the driveway and backfire. And you have lots of problems that is ultimately the job of the NSA and defense programs is making sure

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Sarah Nelson: That in the absence of testing that that stockpile should work. Should we need it. So is that Alfa Romeo safe, secure and effective. I don't know. Let's find out.

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Sarah Nelson: So on the bottom we. These are some really great pictures and in JAMA Frazier assembled. So on the bottom, you see.

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Sarah Nelson: A shot on the bottom left, that's a, that's a nuclear test on the bottom right, you see that is what a test would look like. You see the tower. You see the cranes. You see those miles of black cables.

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Sarah Nelson: All of this tons of people trailers and all kinds of instrumentation, these, these are really major

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Sarah Nelson: endeavors. And right now, how we do that is on the top, you see on the top left, we have modeling, simulation and 3D looking at pressure and density plots of work in our that looks like RTI actually

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Sarah Nelson: And on the right, the top right you see the National Ignition Facility. So we have these world class state of the art HDD facilities to help us in that mission.

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Sarah Nelson: So a major focus area for in an essay is an understanding properties of hundred density plasmas or HTTP or Hydra density physics. So we've got the definition for high energy density plasma that is

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Sarah Nelson: Defined as energy density greater than point 1 trillion joules per cubic meter more than 20 times the pressure needed to make a diamond. So that's a lot of pressure, you can imagine this is, you know, kind of stellar environments and so on.

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Sarah Nelson: So achieving these extreme states of matter relevant to understanding nuclear weapons is made possible with these HDD facilities like I've already mentioned the National Ignition Facility or NIF

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Sarah Nelson: The Omega laser at the laboratory for Laser Energetics and Rochester, New York, and the Z machine at Sandia National Lab and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Sarah Nelson: And you say, well why and because here's the cool graphic I mentioned earlier on. This is not a weapons talk and this is the closest we're going to get y'all so

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Sarah Nelson: Because the majority of the yield of a nuclear weapon occurs in the high energy density state.

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Sarah Nelson: So you see going from left to right, you have the high explosive phase, there are high explosives that create a supercritical assembly of that primary. That's the pre nuclear that's just the chemical explosion that that goes off, then it goes over to the right sweeps to the right.

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Sarah Nelson: I'm seeing sweeps to the right as far as the the arc of the graphic. So the primary phase, there is now a supercritical assembly and that is the primary energy production of of the device. The energy transfers.

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Sarah Nelson: Down the device primary to the secondary and then the secondary phase produces energy explosion and radiation.

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Sarah Nelson: So that nuclear phase is is in that little center portion there with that with that arrow. So this is just a basic generic generic weapons one on one, how one of our stockpile devices works.

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Sarah Nelson: Oh, and then and the parentheses at the bottom. On the left you see that there's underground tests. There's some critical experiments so sub critical means

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Sarah Nelson: Not a critical mass or assembly of a or a yield producing radionuclides a special nuclear material, so it's not going to achieve nuclear yield.

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Sarah Nelson: Dart is the dual access rad hydro test facility that's at Los Alamos National Lab Jasper is the joint activate shock physics experiment.

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Sarah Nelson: Oh, I'm forgetting the our shoot Livermore is going to kill me for that I forgot the are, but it's a it's a large Gascon facility that does shock physics experiments for us. So, so that's so that's all

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Sarah Nelson: That non non nuclear yield types of types of experiments.

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Sarah Nelson: So to maintain deterrence and deterrence meaning keeping other nations from aggression via nuclear use of nuclear weapons or to deter those from

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Sarah Nelson: starting their own nuclear weapons program. The US must maintain preeminence and weapons science, technology and engineering and through some of these

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Sarah Nelson: Capabilities ever talked about NIF Dart and the advanced simulations, that's a super computing. We have some very powerful supercomputers that we use to do modeling and simulation.

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Sarah Nelson: This and through at physics is is one of the ways that that we reach our adversaries that they do not mean to take up their own nuclear arms.

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Sarah Nelson: And we can do some of these other things like anticipate and respond to technical surprise because there is a some referred to as a democratization of technology.

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Sarah Nelson: Worldwide folks are catching up in various types of fields and learning things on their own and to be able to recruit and train and retain world class next generation nuclear steward stockpile stewards. And those are the undergrads grad students postdocs and junior staff of today.

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Sarah Nelson: It's like, well, how do you do that, I say, I'm with the federal government. I am here to help.

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Sarah Nelson: So there are a number of things that NSA does besides a stewardship of the nuclear stockpile. So you see the nuclear stockpile on on the left.

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Sarah Nelson: There's also Nuclear Threat Reduction. Some of you may be familiar with Defense Nuclear Non Proliferation or na 20

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Sarah Nelson: Any 22 is the R amp D section of that organization. They do a lot with nuclear forensics and understanding nuclear detonation and and

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Sarah Nelson: And things of that nature at countering responding to proliferation dealing with Non Proliferation that and and and that type of that type of threat and we also provide operational support for a naval nuclear propulsion. So the, the Naval Submarine the nuclear submarine fleet.

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Sarah Nelson: And across these there's science, technology, engineering, there's people there's management of these big facilities and the big labs, so there's there's quite a lot that the NSA encompasses which you don't see here is

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Sarah Nelson: It or yeah those

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Sarah Nelson: Support type organizations like

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Sarah Nelson: The infrastructure folks in any 50 and so on, but they are key to the success of our mission. So here's some of our leadership, the highest level leadership. You see, and the top center there is

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Sarah Nelson: Secretary Berlet. He is the second Secretary of Energy under President Trump. He was confirmed on December 2

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Sarah Nelson: In the bottom left, you see Dr. Bill bookless. He is the acting under sir secretary for nuclear security and the Acting Administrator of the NSA

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Sarah Nelson: So he is the head of the NSA because the NSA is a sub element. We are a semi autonomous sub element of the Department of Energy and he was confirmed may 23 2019 in his deputy role.

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Sarah Nelson: The our former administrator, Miss Lisa Gordon Haggerty did recently resigned and he Dr bookless is now acting in her place.

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Sarah Nelson: And then on the bottom right, you see Dr. Charles burden. He is the Deputy Administrator for defense program. So he is the head of defense programs or in NSA parlance, the NA 10 for any an NSA and he was confirmed on September 18 2018

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Sarah Nelson: So that's a lot of our leadership. So drilling down that we've we've talked about do we, and NSA and now defense programs.

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Sarah Nelson: This is stockpile research, technology and engineering. This is the R amp D piece of defense programs are the core RDP of defense programs. So there are a number of things here in the honeycomb.

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Sarah Nelson: There's advanced manufacturing. There's engineering advanced simulation computing, which I mentioned earlier, these two highlighted in green are the office.

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Sarah Nelson: For which I was most recently, Deputy Director. This is assessment science and inertial confinement fusion so assessment science. You can read. You can read these on the slides.

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Sarah Nelson: We have the weapons relevant data models and capabilities that increase confidence and annual assessments and certification of refurbished weapons.

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Sarah Nelson: Looking into significant finding investigations, etc, etc. So inertial confinement fusion was recently joined with assessment science to make the office.

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Sarah Nelson: Of experimental sciences, because these are so used to be separate programs. It's a little NSA box ology for you, but we're now one big happy family.

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Sarah Nelson: And the CF program delivers HDD physics platforms to assess Extreme, extreme conditions essential to assessing the weapons.

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Sarah Nelson: So, that is, sir. We've gone from big we're going now down to small

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Sarah Nelson: And here are some of the critical elements of science based stewardship. You can see the five across the top that's enabling the stockpile missions quantifying these weapons phenomena.

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Sarah Nelson: Providing scientific deterrence building and maintaining experimental tools for the complex and ensuring stewardship sustainability. So that's

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Sarah Nelson: Again from left to right, support for the life extension programs or LPS that you see there the scientific basis certification qualification, because remember I mentioned we can't, we can't sometimes do these the old way and we can't

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Sarah Nelson: Explore these explosively as a full system tests like we used to. So what are, what are the ways that we can that we can do to improve our understanding

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Sarah Nelson: Their weapons phenomena like thermonuclear burn read transport read hydro material plasma nuclear properties outputs in effects for survivability. Those are the aspects, I'll be getting into a bit more in a few slides, providing deterrence.

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Sarah Nelson: The ability for the United States to publish the these sorts of r&d papers. Obviously all unclassified but but publishing on

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Sarah Nelson: scientific topics relevant to weapons topics can communicate to other nations.

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Sarah Nelson: That that we are at the forefront of this technology that we really do know what's going on. We understand what's going on.

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Sarah Nelson: And it can deter people from pursuing their own nefarious ends or developing their own programs. So by continually demonstrating excellence in in these subject areas.

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Sarah Nelson: That's also, it's kind of like a paper based deterrence. It's a research based deterrence.

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Sarah Nelson: Building and maintaining experimental tools we have these big facilities which I'm going to cover in just a moment.

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Sarah Nelson: The targets that are fired at the center of the optics that are required to to conduct the experiment and measure

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Sarah Nelson: Measure the results and the diagnostics which which take these measurements and that might just be for words but they are for very important words in our HDD experimental science.

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Sarah Nelson: And ensuring stewardship sustainability. And that goes back to that people aspect that I spoke to a minute ago about that next generation that next pipeline of people

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Sarah Nelson: So going into the science. I'm not going to read this verbatim. But we also we have to look at a lot of different aspects of this. There's the enduring stockpile.

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Sarah Nelson: There's life extension of the devices that we have the systems that we have and what do we, what do we need to extend the life of these

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Sarah Nelson: Because we're not making new weapons, as I stated in a previous slide. So how do we extend the life of the ones that we have for the things that we know might be near the component that might be near the end of life.

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Sarah Nelson: So looking into those future stockpile needs is is very important.

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Sarah Nelson: Looking at our knowledge base and infrastructure preserves that US core intellectual and technical competency, like I said, it's, it's that in that contributes to that.

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Sarah Nelson: That intellectual deterrence that I mentioned earlier and recruiting new people to work on really hard problems of national importance which really was one of the things that motivated me to come to NSA, there was a real

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Sarah Nelson: sense of mission drive for me to continue working in national defense. It was very meaningful for me and at a broad sense, we

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Sarah Nelson: We work with others. We work with counterterrorism folks we work with the

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Sarah Nelson: With the Defense Nuclear Non Proliferation folks. So there's quite a bit of coordination across the NSA. That is really important and meaningful to look into non stockpile designs you kind of you already DS and, you know, what have you made maybe out there by by malicious actors.

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Sarah Nelson: So drilling down a little bit farther. Here's some more of our leadership, you see.

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Sarah Nelson: Dr. Mark Anderson. Some of you may know him from Los Alamos National Lab. He that was his career. Prior to coming to the NSA, a few years ago.

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Sarah Nelson: He's a member of the senior executive service and he is the Assistant Deputy Administrator Ada in government terms for stockpile research, technology and engineering. That's in NSA parlance that's na 11

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Sarah Nelson: So now we're going down even further below Charlie Burton

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Sarah Nelson: And then there's a doctor in JAMA Frazier, many of you are probably familiar with her. She's been around the ice of community for years. She's also a member, a member of the senior executive service and Director of the Office of experimental sciences or an A 113

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Sarah Nelson: And here you see this lovely donut chart. I love donut charts. I think they're so good at illustrating things and you see those two little pieces in green.

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Sarah Nelson: That 10 and that 19% that's the 2020 I believe that was a 2020 presidential budget request, you can see that is all of this is all of

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Sarah Nelson: See production modernization. Yeah, this is all of defense programs. So it's nearly 20% of all the defense programs in

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Sarah Nelson: in these in these two sections. So this is the this is the non oh yes this is oh yes so so that's quite a bit of R amp D.

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Sarah Nelson: And that stockpile management. That's the legacy systems infrastructure and operations production monetization. That's the office gone to Defense Nuclear Security nuclear security secur transportation. Those are the folks with the big trailers

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Sarah Nelson: That transport devices around you for inventory and you just material material movement purposes.

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Sarah Nelson: So moving on, or facilities. This is one of the one of the major focus areas of my presentation today. How we doing on time.

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Sarah Nelson: We're a little shy of halfway. Okay, so, um,

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Sarah Nelson: NSA supports the three major high energy density physics facilities in the United States. And I already mentioned all three of these before. I'll do so again now with a couple of little factoids on each one.

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Sarah Nelson: There's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories National Ignition Facility. It's the largest laser on Earth, it's the size of three football fields.

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Sarah Nelson: There is the University of Rochester omega laser facility. It has a very high shot rate. I think they can get off about 10 shots per day. So that is comparable to the one to two a day of which is, it was just really significant.

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Sarah Nelson: And that is our own you see NIF is the primary facility for laser indirect Dr fusion. I'll get into that a little bit more in a few slides.

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Sarah Nelson: Omega is the primary facility for laser direct Dr fusion approach. And then on the right we have z. And that is the classic arcs and sparks photo which

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Sarah Nelson: You know presentation will be without that, and a mushroom cloud that is the largest pulse power facility on Earth. Ryan can correct me if I'm wrong, I believe it is a 28 mega AMP facility.

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Sarah Nelson: That has a lot of current put the river very small area. And so it is it is very powerful. And that is the primary facility for magnetic direct drive fusion. So you see our three fusion approaches there.

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Sarah Nelson: Here is a kind of a topical outline of where we're going to go next. So first off is I cf. Then we're going to do stockpile applications of HTTP hustle nuclear environments dynamic compression of materials and advanced diagnostics. So drilling in on I CF

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Sarah Nelson: Quickly, I wanted to call out this this slide here on the exciting fundamental science we can do with different yield regimes of

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Sarah Nelson: Of these facilities. So you see the megajoule ranges on the left and add applications on the right. So you can look at burnin mix here you have nuclear physics data.

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Sarah Nelson: As a nuclear physicist, I clued onto something. When I was at Livermore, and I heard that there are some who have observed

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Sarah Nelson: And a nuclear summer population and version in reactions, driven by the National Ignition Facility and if anybody has any more information on that. I would love to hear about it because I feel free to email me a paper if there's been anything published on that because, unfortunately.

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Sarah Nelson: By the time I moved down from Livermore, I hadn't heard how that ended so

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Sarah Nelson: I thought that was fascinating that there'd be there'd be this is summer population and version between a meta stable state in the ground state. So,

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Sarah Nelson: If anybody has info on that, please send it my way. So that's just one example. And that's at a very low energy range if we get up to

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Sarah Nelson: Over 500 mega joules. We're talking. We're in the ignition regime burning plasmas. This could be

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Sarah Nelson: Absolutely game changing for stockpile science and ignition physics is weapon physics there's, there's a lot of lot of relationships there and and we could really learn some phenomenal things about about science in general if we are able to get to a laboratory burning plasma.

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Sarah Nelson: By the way, NIF just had its record neutron yield.

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Sarah Nelson: I have a note on that now that we're on the next slide.

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Sarah Nelson: That's, that's another slide. So these are some of the beautiful slides I stole from Sean Finnegan that the picture on the right is an image of the inside of the NIF target chamber with the baffles and some of the diagnostics petitioners target petitioners

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Sarah Nelson: It is the world's largest world's largest, most energetic laser facility with 192 beams that can deliver 1.8 mega joules. So the energy of a car at highway speeds began operations in March 2009

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Sarah Nelson: You see some of the other. Some of the other metrics there. It's about a 400 plus experiments. So a little bit more than one per day. And there's a couple

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Sarah Nelson: There's some plan maintenance periods in there too. So, but it does experiments over host of different areas. There's discovery science that's the basic science national security HDD and ignition science.

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Sarah Nelson: Some of the key roles for NIF are to test materials and design options for these life extension programs or LPS we're able to measure plutonium properties in if obviously very small quantities, but we can actually there are plutonium platforms that can be fielded enough to understand

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Sarah Nelson: How it behaves under those pressures.

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Sarah Nelson: The great pressure is generated in such a in such a experiment.

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Sarah Nelson: There are, it can be a neutron generator and x ray generator for hostile survivability TESTING, THERE IS THAT IS THE LEAD facility for the indirect drive fusion ignition approach and it is the only facility size and built to attempt ignition.

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Sarah Nelson: That's an important thing to call out. So here's a cartoon of laser indirect drive and which is one of his lead for so

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Sarah Nelson: Going from left to right. So you see over here. There's these blue beams. There's the laser beams and they enter this little thing this little thing called a can.

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Sarah Nelson: Or a whole room and it's held in place by by this very specifically designed

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Sarah Nelson: Arm and there's a lot of design that goes into even a whole realm that horror on physics has its own subject but

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Sarah Nelson: The basic concept is the lasers come in and basically a rocket reaction happens, it generates radiation that pushes there's a pressure that pushes on that fuel capsule there and

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Sarah Nelson: In the attempt that it will ignite. So they're in a high quality implosion. You'd have a very spherical hot implosion there as it's compressed the Digi fuel would

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Sarah Nelson: Fuse and he would have alpha heating and then ignition and and then it would, you'd have burn which will be great. We're not quite there yet, but

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Sarah Nelson: Nick did have its record. And like I said, and I have some notes on this that I'm going to read

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Sarah Nelson: So just achieved a record primary neutron yield of 3.11 times 10 to the 16 neutrons.

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Sarah Nelson: Was from a dT layer capsule through increased scale pressure and velocity so awesome job everybody at NIF for for getting there. That's

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Sarah Nelson: Absolutely. The, the direction we want to be going, which is fantastic progress.

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Sarah Nelson: This is one of the coolest things about my job is I get to see progress on this and this is just one segment of the research that we do. There's a whole host of other things that we do beyond a GDP, so it. I really enjoy my job. So moving on to omega

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Sarah Nelson: There you see the cartoon of omega. On the left, it is a 60 beam 30 kilo jewel main laser. There's a mega EP, which is a short pulse capable laser. They have a lot of diagnostics on omega and I said they had a very high shot rate they could do approximately 2100 experiments, a year.

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Sarah Nelson: He rolls for omega. There are a lot of new methods and diagnostics that they developed for NIF actually when I was working when Ryan was introducing me he mentioned my time at the different defense fret. Reduction Agency.

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Sarah Nelson: We funded and worked with both LLC, that has omega and Livermore that has NIF to

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Sarah Nelson: Build the NIF x ray spectrometer, or the the access which I understand is in is in pretty common use today. And that was a pretty exciting thing. I actually got to go to some of the commissioning experiments for that so

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Sarah Nelson: Omega, and when it's possible to do that because of the really high shot right that omega house so

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Sarah Nelson: They have pioneered some real breakthroughs in laser technology. They are still doing that to this day. They are the lead for the laser indirect Dr fusion approach, which I believe I have a cartoon on in the next slide and

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Sarah Nelson: Rochester generates so many students trained and he add science. You can see some of the metrics there. They have a new HDD degree program.

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Sarah Nelson: Hundreds of folks come out, have come out of their program, it's been it's been highly successful. So we thank Rochester for their very contribution to the future workforce.

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Sarah Nelson: So here's a cartoon of laser direct drive so so you saw in the NIF cartoon earlier on indirect drive you saw all of those laser beams hitting the side of that can or whole ROM and then generating that pressure indirectly.

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Sarah Nelson: By that means here the laser beams directly impinge upon that target capsule. Now you might think wow, well that's that's really hard because if one of those beams is a little bit off or a little lower.

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Sarah Nelson: You can see where there would be great instabilities generated there, but this is still a major source of research for

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Sarah Nelson: For laser director I fusion.

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Sarah Nelson: And last but certainly not least, is the z pulse power facility. It is the world's most powerful laboratory radiation source.

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Sarah Nelson: It has an electrical pulse that is 1000 times the power of a lightning bolt. There's a blow up of the arcs and sparks photo that is a long exposure time photo of

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Sarah Nelson: Just the electrical breakdown or around the air breakdown around the the devices, it's firing and Ryan could probably tell you a lot more about that than I can, because it gives you work there.

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Sarah Nelson: And it delivers his power in a very short amount of time. So you can imagine that amount of power in that short of time in that small space.

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Sarah Nelson: That's a very, it's a very violent extreme environment for to get in, which should conduct an experiment. So there's also a to kilojoules. The beam laser facility that is is coupled to a to z. So, there can be extra backlighting preheating experiments and so on.

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Sarah Nelson: Some key roles for z. They also do plutonium properties material science and they can answer aging and manufacturing questions and you can put a larger sample of plutonium into the XE machine. There's a fast.

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Sarah Nelson: Fast closure device that will prevent contamination of the surrounding area and the device because obviously we don't want to

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Sarah Nelson: Exclude plutonium all of this and get people you know contaminated and contaminate the facility of nobody wants that. So they really done a very good job at at their containment facility. So we can do plutonium shots. A few times a year.

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Sarah Nelson: Because this is such a

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Sarah Nelson: Big X resource we can validate these hostile environment models for hostile survivability of a nuclear weapon and they are the lead facility for the magnetic direct drive

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Sarah Nelson: Fusion ignition approach, which I will cover here. And actually, I think this is a mag live picture, and I'm going to look to Ryan if he's nodding. Yeah, this is

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Sarah Nelson: An image of a the compression says workspace on the Lawrence force where you can't. Maybe you can see my hand where you squeeze it and and the force.

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Sarah Nelson: The foursquare that so I'm not going to get into a great amount of technical detail on this I am not, as well versed in Megalith as others. Please see Professor McBride. For more information, but this is a very promising approach to

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Sarah Nelson: To ignition fielded in a magnetic approach as opposed to a laser based approach that that NIF and omega provide

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Sarah Nelson: So some of the science that that we do.

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Sarah Nelson: Related to ignition also involves instabilities. This is laser plasma instability or LP I this poses a challenge to coupling of the the laser energy to the ICM capsules and you can see there's there's quite a bit here. I believe this is a Los Alamos slide that they generously provided

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Sarah Nelson: There's a lot of modeling done on some very large scale and NSA supercomputers trying to understand this.

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Sarah Nelson: The, the laser material interactions can change the character of the radiation and the energy goes where we don't want it and we obviously don't want that to happen, we want as much energy going into the capsule as possible so

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Sarah Nelson: phenomena such as seabed or cross beam energy transfer. Are we need a better understand those processes and these are there are some efforts that are going on in this and this isn't a phenomenon. It's usually

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Sarah Nelson: Included in hydrodynamic simulations. So we're working to include that. But it is a work in progress. So we want to have

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Sarah Nelson: The greatest coupling of that laser energy to the capsule as possible. And there's some really great frontier cutting edge physics, this is, this is an active area. There's a lot of work going on with Los Alamos and omega working on this working on this topic.

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Sarah Nelson: So that was my last slide on ice off going on a stockpile applications. That was the most in depth, I get into any of the of the topical areas. Just be mindful of time.

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Sarah Nelson: So here are a few other slides from actually from Los Alamos, these are on stockpile relevant studies and here we have

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Sarah Nelson: On the left you see the marble platform. And then you see the double shell ignition platform marble is probing plasma micro physics and how does

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Sarah Nelson: This impact burn our if the, if there are bigger pieces of material injected into

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Sarah Nelson: The hot spot. How does that affect burn. And then on the right you see the double shell ignition experiments that are studying this volumetric thermonuclear burn it basically is looking at radiation trapping and they are trying to

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Sarah Nelson: Keep the photons inside because the fuel will stay hotter longer and that's what we want. So those are some very high level explanations of that kind of work going on.

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Sarah Nelson: With some of our national labs, a lot of labs collaborate on these efforts. So, I hate to call out one or one or two in particular.

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Sarah Nelson: Here, I know, previous to me coming to Mitzi you had Frank Graziano from Livermore lab and he gave a great talk unsure on

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Sarah Nelson: Really tailor instabilities and and instabilities in general. So there are experimental platforms and simulations that we can use to look at how those instabilities affect mix and burn.

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Sarah Nelson: You can see, let's see, there are

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Sarah Nelson: So you can see here some of the some of the ripples. If there's a multi multiple shocks introduced so there's first shock second shock.

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Sarah Nelson: Etc. So you can see the growth of these things in time. And here's a this is this is a different platform. But here you see the x ray

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Sarah Nelson: That's a code prediction and there you see the experimental image. Isn't that cool. I just think that's cool. I'm not a computational person. I'm, I'm an experimental this but when the experiment and the simulation look that good.

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Sarah Nelson: THERE'S THERE'S SOMETHING THERE'S SOMETHING GOING RIGHT THERE, which is fantastic to see, especially in something this complex. So,

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Sarah Nelson: Continuing on hostile nuclear environments. I've mentioned a couple of times that is

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Sarah Nelson: survivability of have a weapon in all potentially uncomfortable environments like Sarah. What does that mean,

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Sarah Nelson: Well, one mission focus is being able to assess the effects of hostile environments. And that's a lot of them on nuclear weapons systems. So from the top left, you have electromagnetic radiation that could be emitted by some device you have an air blast, somebody could really

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Sarah Nelson: Poof. A lot of air at at something there could be a detonation of like a chemical just a just a chemical explicit like regular high explosive or something, and there'd be

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Sarah Nelson: That that Shockwave that that air blast that could that could damage a weapon. There's all sorts of x ray spectra that could

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Sarah Nelson: could affect this. There's the delivery of cold X rays that would impact the surface of a warhead warm X rays that would penetrate a little bit further hot X rays, which would penetrate deep into the device.

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Sarah Nelson: And then gamma rays because you were marching up the spectrum that's the highest photon energy penetrating completely what kind of effect. Would this have on my micro electronics that that control the device would there be

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Sarah Nelson: Other effects to the nuclear explosive package that could affect its, its performance and and would not

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Sarah Nelson: It would not perform the way that the US military would want it to perform those are things that we need to be careful about and understand. And lastly, thermal neutrons, there could be some sort of way for an adversary to

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Sarah Nelson: To have neutrons impinge upon a device and they we've already talked about. There's nuclear materials inside these what sort of interactions would would neutrons have with what's in the nuclear explosive package. So being able to understand all of that is really important. So

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Sarah Nelson: Moving on. So Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Lab are collaborating to produce some record levels of

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Sarah Nelson: X rays greater than 10 kilo electron volts using a variety of Z pinch sources. You can see we've got a lot of citations sprinkled throughout here. So, and I know that this will be available to folks later on if you wanted to look these up, but

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Sarah Nelson: So you see, you see the spectrum. Here you see the photon energy as as we go up. So you see that there's quite a lot. There's aluminum argon stainless steel, copper Krypton and molybdenum

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Sarah Nelson: covering a lot of space. And then we have the x ray fluence. So how many X rays are going through that that area and and as a function of what energy x ray and so NSA facilities enough. We were here in 2012 we could produce this but now as a

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Sarah Nelson: There's even more we're filling in this has been referred to as the bathtub chart because it had this dip in the middle.

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Sarah Nelson: So we're filling in that bathtub Saturn is a different a different post power generator, it's, it's a different apparatus.

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Sarah Nelson: That is not a facility that that I have worked with before. That's not the purview of the Office of experimental sciences, so that is not covered in this talk, but Saturn's much harder.

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Sarah Nelson: X ray regime. So it's really great that we've done that because that means that we can simulate even more environments for hostile encounters for these weapons.

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Sarah Nelson: marching through we have dynamic compression materials and there's a lot of stuff in a warhead and understanding the high pressure properties of the stockpile relevant materials, how can we reach us on an add

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Sarah Nelson: On an HDD

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Sarah Nelson: Facility to word I'm looking for. So, there is a need for accurate next gen material property models and basically focusing on the phase of the material.

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Sarah Nelson: And the strength in the material. Here's a couple of really great examples I stole this from Alan one at Lawrence Livermore, you see it this is carbon. So here we have carbon

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Sarah Nelson: 06 but in one phase. It's graphite and you see it's atomic structure with the sheets and in here it's diamond and this has a much different structure and, you know, graphite is in your pencil and two people even still use I still use pencils. But I'm a diamond is a much harder material.

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Sarah Nelson: And the strength, the material of the material matters. Here's water with strength because it's frozen. Here's water without strength because this guy's going kayaking.

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Sarah Nelson: So he can deliver validation data in regimes that are previously only access through theory and simulations, or in a nuclear weapon detonation. So, but we're not testing things

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Sarah Nelson: Not testing things like water in a nuclear device detonation anyway. So one of the things we've looked at is vaporisation of iron. This is a really great project.

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Sarah Nelson: Partnering with a Harvard UC Davis Lawrence Livermore, I believe this might have been Rick crosses work on z, you can

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Sarah Nelson: Launch this flyer plates that impinge upon a sample. So here's a projectile. Here's your iron

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Sarah Nelson: There's vacuum courts window. And here's where your diagnostics are looking if people can see my little my little cursor. So here's your here's your visor diagnostic and when this projectile accelerated from Z.

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Sarah Nelson: Smacks into this iron sample it turns into a supercritical iron fluid that then hits this this window and and you get these you get these data, he see

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Sarah Nelson: How, how the iron behaves. So this, this has implications for planetary structure. So there's astrophysics applications here, this isn't just all all weapons physics. I don't want anyone to get their own idea here. There's quite a lot of very basic and fundamental science that goes on. That's

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Sarah Nelson: That these skills are are directly translatable so we can do all kinds of really great experiments of this type, you can see the variety, the number of of impacts and the, the impact of velocity. And you see that those are some really, really high velocities and at least in my world.

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Sarah Nelson: And you see some of the data. The data here.

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Sarah Nelson: And like I said labs collaborate really strongly on us.

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Sarah Nelson: I'm going on mentioned lab collaboration. This is another really great example of it. This is the try lab and that is Livermore Los Alamos and Sandia study of tantalum strength and because there's

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Sarah Nelson: All these different platforms available to us. You might ask well,

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Sarah Nelson: If they're so different. There's different approaches. You're not fielding apples to apples. Well how comparable are these are these data. So, for example, how does data from Z compare to NIF or even a gasket.

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Sarah Nelson: To different parts of the face face. So the labs are collaborating together to to look at tantalum strength.

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Sarah Nelson: All in different ways and compare it with simulations. So they're yeah they're again using interferometry to to look at the interface.

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Sarah Nelson: Velocity their with their samples. So was there a few examples from Z. But like I said, this is a trial at Project. They're all approaching it and in different ways.

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Sarah Nelson: Which and this is now this has been going on for a few years and it's been a very fruitful collaboration. We're happy to see that.

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Sarah Nelson: Last but not least, advanced diagnostics. So usual day and the target chamber. This is that slide I mentioned where you see the really dirty.

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Sarah Nelson: Inside of the Z machine, you see that in the after section so diagnostics to that would be fielded on in an environment like this, obviously have to be robust

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Sarah Nelson: So this is one of the reasons that z can only do one shot a day because this is a major undertaking to take this thing apart, clean it out reassemble it and get ready for the next shot.

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Sarah Nelson: The next day. So, and some of the diagnostic housings on z are basically one inch thick tons tungsten

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Sarah Nelson: So there's there's some extreme environments, we have to be prepared for and other facilities have their own harsh environments like like NIF closer you are to target chamber center and if the more violent

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Sarah Nelson: An impact you will see upon those diagnostics as well. So here's a variety of diagnostics and platforms.

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Sarah Nelson: Development for plasma material properties.

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Sarah Nelson: Two of them are examining different equations of state of materials.

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Sarah Nelson: And then there's the X x THE

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Sarah Nelson: You know I'm in the middle of a talk. And of course, I'm going to forget the acronym. Now, but the extended x ray absorption find structure that's what it is there to understand both material temperatures from from a material. So,

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Sarah Nelson: These are all important things for us to be aware of and and measuring

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Sarah Nelson: For material properties. So you're like, All right, cool. Sarah, what does this have to do with me. I know I'm coming to the end. So I'll go a little bit faster but jobs, cuz

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Sarah Nelson: You all want to be employable after your education, don't you, so

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Sarah Nelson: All right, going back to in the Wayback Machine to me in 2008 I was a postdoc Roger basal postdoc at Lawrence Livermore, and this was NIF radio chemistry. The device.

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Sarah Nelson: Performance of the device could be determined through tracer activations tracer activations neutron activation of small amount of material.

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Sarah Nelson: And there's a lot of cross sections that are required to interpret these tracer data and they're unknown or they have theoretical cross sections. I had huge uncertainties uncertainty Aero bars. So some of these

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Sarah Nelson: Can't be measured through, easy, easy means through nuclear physics that an accelerator either the target is non existent or it's too radioactive or two.

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Sarah Nelson: Too short lived to to be safely handled. There's all kinds of reasons why there aren't data or the data or sparse so interpret interpretation over the radio chemical data has some large uncertainties and

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Sarah Nelson: This is old, old graph.

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Sarah Nelson: This has the number of target Adams required for a measurement is inversely proportional to the flux. So, this was envisioned if Nick had achieved ignition. This is, this is your, your neutron flux

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Sarah Nelson: NIF at ignition has so many more. You could use a tiny amount of doping in an F capsule. So that was the thought that we would open if capsule with a tiny amount of material seen in the next screen. So you see, these are some dope events that have

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Sarah Nelson: A known cross section and black and then an unknown cross section in red. And if you assume that this is an

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Sarah Nelson: isotopic process. You know what the neutron influences, then you know how many neutrons have impinged upon your, your red unknown sample you can derive a cross section.

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Sarah Nelson: And count count the activity you collect the activity count the activity. That's why I was collecting debris in a Z pinch. So even though I didn't

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Sarah Nelson: I did not start my postdoc with a clearance and this is all this is all work that's very relevant to to understanding not only basic science but applied stockpile science and it's important for for us to know these these quantities.

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Sarah Nelson: So, um, and that is one of the reasons I'm here talking to you today. So I'm now about 12 years out from my PhD and really thrilled with the job I have. But if you think about it.

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Sarah Nelson: If our last tests were 30 years ago, a lot of those folks are unfortunately retired or they've passed on and there's not a lot of people left or national labs with

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Sarah Nelson: Actual nuclear test experience. And so how do we get people in the absence of have having the ability to run an experiment like that because we're not doing underground testing.

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Sarah Nelson: We need to be able to do these experiments on these HDD facilities on other on other types of facilities do the basic science and and grow people up through the systems so that they can be the next generation stock power stewards and

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Sarah Nelson: So you see that and then the global threats aren't going away. Right. I mean, I hesitate to say that, but the world is evolving and

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Sarah Nelson: I didn't know a year ago I was going to be in the middle of a pandemic, so

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Sarah Nelson: I bet, I bet nobody else here. Did either. So there's a lot of things we can't, we can't know. And so we need to be prepared as a nation. And by having an appropriately trained world class workforce. That's one of the ways that we can

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Sarah Nelson: We can address that that issue in a changing geopolitical environment. So we have a lot of academic programs. That's one of the reasons I know Ryan and Carolyn.

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Sarah Nelson: We had a lot of different programs that are components of that, there's the stewardship science academic alliances are SSH, but has single API grants and centers.

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Sarah Nelson: There's a minority serving institution partnership program that deals primarily with MS is there's tribal there's HSI there's HBC us

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Sarah Nelson: There's the joint program and high energy density laboratory plasmas. Many of you may be familiar with this.

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Sarah Nelson: Computational Science graduate fellowships FCS JF and then the predictive science academic alliance program that's primarily computational

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Sarah Nelson: But they run, large and small centers the SSA a program also has two kinds of fellowships available. The SS G, F, which is the stewardship science graduate fellowship and the L RGS my baby.

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Sarah Nelson: The laboratory residency graduate fellowship and that is exactly what it sounds like it you get to do a laboratory residency at one of our NSA national labs and including the Nevada test site if applicable. So they are very competitive.

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Sarah Nelson: We've got a couple folks in the audience, I hope that are actually recipients. So I'd say raise your hands. But, you know, if I were in an auditorium. It's a raise your hands, but you can. So, um, but there. There are at least two folks that I aware. I'm AWARE OF

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Sarah Nelson: That have these might be in the audience today. So, and we only award maybe

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Sarah Nelson: nine a year.

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Sarah Nelson: So it's it's it's a rare community to be a part of and please do I believe the application periods are open right now. I think I have some some information on that and we we attract the great workforce pipeline, we look to

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Sarah Nelson: That academic experience coming in and refreshing techniques with the labs and that creative input to

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Sarah Nelson: Leverage experience that you had in the world and other scientific fields to really help the nation. So I mentioned JP, he DLP, so there's going to be a funding opportunity announcement or for

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Sarah Nelson: Late this oh wow that's next month. So looks like the joint programs coming out with a phone that is a joint with the daily Office of Science.

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Sarah Nelson: There are the centers of excellence for SSH a are coming. Do those are about every five years. So that is an infrequent application process that's coming late and 2021

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Sarah Nelson: There's the CSS g f deadline. There's the LR F deadline. And then there's the SSG F deadline and all of those are available on the Krell Institute website also for those of you who

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Sarah Nelson: Have not graduated, but might be more curious about

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Sarah Nelson: What it's like in federal employment, we have the NSA Graduate Fellowship Program. And that's when we take either people that are on the way to a Masters or PhD technical and non technical

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Sarah Nelson: And you apply it and it's a one year fellowship program and you can be placed in a number of different offices all across NSA and all across the number of sites because the site offices or an option as well.

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Sarah Nelson: So, highly recommend those you're like alright cool anything else. But wait, there's more. Let's just like the infomercial I'm rounding it out. I'm almost at an hour. So we have had a reporter palooza poor Paul Davis has been at the center of so many

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Sarah Nelson: Reports, he is he, he, his stamina is is admirable and he has done a very great job.

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Sarah Nelson: Coordinating MULTIPLE HIGH LEVEL high visibility studies at the same time. So,

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Sarah Nelson: These are a few of them. These are the first three and I took these slides. If you saw the town hall presentation at the APS DPP last week you'll recognize this content.

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Sarah Nelson: So there's the ice of 2020 report, which is a big one, dealing with the efficacy of reaching ignition on NIF and achieving credible physics scaling to multi megajoule fusion yields for each of the three major ice ignition approaches.

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Sarah Nelson: Well, we did that one to ourselves that was an NSA mandated study because

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Sarah Nelson: We have not yet achieved ignition. We had hoped we have done so by now and I'll go into that in a few slides there is the JSON report that was asked for by Congress. This is

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Sarah Nelson: I believe nearly complete they're doing an independent review the ICM program.

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Sarah Nelson: And then there's the National Academy of Sciences. We were asked by Congress to do an assessment of high energy density physics and that's HDD at large.

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Sarah Nelson: Not just as relates to weapon programs so that that's a much bigger study that's getting underway. That's about an 18 month study. Continuing on, we were required by Senate energy and water to

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Sarah Nelson: Do report on planning or meeting to exceed near pure technology development and lasers and pulse power that's already been delivered to Congress.

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Sarah Nelson: There is a joint program in higher density laboratory plasma that academic program. I was just mentioning, I believe that Allah has been delivered a congress

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Sarah Nelson: And there's a plutonium science and metallurgy report that was just delivered. And then there's this major science question facing. That's a greater stockpile stewardship SSP report that we have been

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Sarah Nelson: Asked to provide so working at headquarters is never dull. We get to respond to a lot of these these inquiries and they're really good experiences. Honestly, I'm

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Sarah Nelson: Poor Paul would probably cost me upside the head for saying that because it's been consuming so much of his time, but he's been very gracious and professional throughout this achieving so much it at once. So back to the

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Sarah Nelson: I mentioned I basically read this verbatim. So it's looking at the efficacy of reaching addition on NIF incredible physics scaling to multi megajoule yields for the three ignition approaches.

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Sarah Nelson: So the ICM red team had a number of goals. This was started back in 2016 so this has been going on for years now. There were three years worth of

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Sarah Nelson: Red team meetings, so we're red teaming it as a kind of an adversarial look at the program. Like, why haven't you done this and why are you looking at that and this happened once a year for three years for each of the different approaches and

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Sarah Nelson: Looking at different types of questions from the Charter each member of the red team provides our own independent report, the red team. I had to delete it. The slide was was really, really busy, but

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Sarah Nelson: There's a vaunted panel of experts from the labs and and outside the labs and including the UK examining this. And so now this committee is in. It's basically concluded and we're at we're coming up with the, the federal response or the federal statement portion of this

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Sarah Nelson: And so I have not altered this content at all from what was presented a DPP so I am absolutely keeping on message.

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Sarah Nelson: And it was stated that NIF as it is currently configured is unlikely to achieve ignition.

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Sarah Nelson: There remains that absorbed energy deficit. Remember I was talking about energy delivery to the capsule.

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Sarah Nelson: We that's, that's something that remains a challenge and but NIF continues to be our best platform to investigate ignition physics and ignition physics, our weapons physics.

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Sarah Nelson: So we have a continued continued progress understanding performance. There's open questions and compression and heating and preheating and all kinds of things. And there's still a lot of

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Sarah Nelson: Peripheral technology development backhand. Go on. So like I mentioned that that record that record neutron yield that they just got their

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Sarah Nelson: This was just just recently and it's still happening. So, um, I think I'm about to wrap up. One of the other things going on right now I understand some of you are participating in this is the ignition science and the 2020s waterfall workshop series.

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Sarah Nelson: I'm not going to read this to you because we're short on time. But there are a number of working groups that exist, your LP I hold on physics compression mix materials, etc.

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Sarah Nelson: And in 21 there is going to be a summary report to the NSA. So if you'd like more information on that. I believe, Professor currents is participating this. I don't know if Ryan. If you are

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Sarah Nelson: We can get you some more information on that. If you would like to be LinkedIn about

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Sarah Nelson: Looking at the National us i CF effort. So this is my closing slide stolen from my Cuneo at Sandia I really liked how he you know he put the facility at the sun because these large a CD facilities are as close as we can get to holding the sun on Earth.

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Sarah Nelson: And so we are able to make these high energy density plasmas at a macroscopic scale, which are invaluable for national security science and fundamental science.

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Sarah Nelson: We're dealing with some really frontier physics. And there's some really hard problems and some of those hard problems are our US security mission related. So when we make measurements on add matter.

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Sarah Nelson: As he put and highlighted and bold and and italicize, it is quite often the measurements disagree with scientific predictions or expectations and we need to be able to do these experiments to validate models.

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Sarah Nelson: If you can't validate your model, you know,

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Sarah Nelson: You can make a model spit out lots of different parameters but and lots of different answers. But if that's not what you're getting in in a in an experiment that's validating that model, then how do you know that your models. Right.

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Sarah Nelson: So Sunday we might be able to create a star, we might get that ignition, which would really dramatically increase the conditions accessible.

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Sarah Nelson: Open up worlds of new frontier science that we could do. And some of it in the national interest for for security. So I believe that's my getting off the stage slide.

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Sarah Nelson: And that's a little bit over an hour. I really apologize. Thank you for your indulgence. I don't know if we have time for Q AMP. A Ryan, I'll turn it back to you well.

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Ryan David McBride: Thank you very much. That's thank you for giving this talk, and especially during, during such busy times

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Ryan David McBride: And challenging times

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Sarah Nelson: Yes, indeed.

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Ryan David McBride: Okay. So I want to just open it up to the Q AMP. A and if anybody has any questions, you can either unmute or type it in the chat.

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Ryan David McBride: I guess, while people are typing. I will

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Ryan David McBride: I was just kind of curious about, you know, the there's this near pure capabilities assessment of lasers and pulse power and just curious actually did really didn't know about that one. So is there anything specific that came out of that.

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Sarah Nelson: You know, that one was completed earlier in the year. And it's been a long time since I've been out of the office since I looked at it. So, I'm afraid. Anything I would be, I'd say might be

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Sarah Nelson: Might be incorrect. So I hesitate to to venture anything out.

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Sarah Nelson: I'm sorry. I know that's really unsatisfying. But there was a great deal cross coordination with a number of different offices with the labs.

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Sarah Nelson: But we can see if we can get you a copy of it.

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Great.

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Ryan David McBride: Um,

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Carolyn Christine Kuranz: I have a question for Sarah Ryan have. That's okay. Um, hi. Carolyn. This was a really great talk. I think you really highlighted the just like

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Carolyn Christine Kuranz: Vast amount of physics that goes into securing the stockpile which is very cool. Is there an effort to like to look at the integration of these physics and and is that even really possible without testing.

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Sarah Nelson: Integration of the physics. You mean like a like a multi physics.

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Sarah Nelson: Yeah, there are some folks that are looking into multi physics models unfortunate that's not so much my wheelhouse that's more the advanced simulation and computing

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Sarah Nelson: And they are looking into whole new kinds of architectures that can be used with the new supercomputers that are that are coming up. So I do believe that is an active area of interest for them.

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Sarah Nelson: Specifically, which physics. I'm not sure. And I would have to check with those folks with the integrated codes.

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Sarah Nelson: I see a question from the chat. A Ryan, you want me to go ahead and I'm field that

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Ryan David McBride: You're yeah

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Sarah Nelson: Okay, cool. Thank you. Thank you for the question, absolute favorite part of the job. I'd say there's two things. One, I work with the most amazing people at headquarters

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Sarah Nelson: When you get into the workplace. They really become like your second family because you spend well pre coven you spend so much time with them. Right.

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Sarah Nelson: And the people that I have worked within the Office of experimental science sciences have been

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Sarah Nelson: Some of the best people I've ever worked with. They are so hard working, they are so dedicated. They are so smart. We have so many really great people and some really great early career people to

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Sarah Nelson: That I'm just in awe of the capabilities of our office. The second part of my job. That is really cool. And I, I have to say.

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Sarah Nelson: I guess millennial parlance hashtag privilege.

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Sarah Nelson: I threw my position as Deputy Director, I get to see the whole landscape of our experimental sciences, I get to go well again pre code, but

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Sarah Nelson: I get to go to Los Alamos Livermore le the test site now that I'm doing this detail position. I'm going to be checking out places like Savannah River Oakridge why 12 pan Tex.

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Sarah Nelson: Kansas City. All of these really amazing facilities that contribute to our national mission and you're getting to attend separate so critical experiments getting in being a part of

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Sarah Nelson: A high explosive experiment that it's all just so cool and and I feel like I get to retain one foot in science and one foot in management or policy, it depends how you want to define policy, but it's been really fulfilling from from

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Sarah Nelson: From that viewpoint, seeing all the cool stuff.

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Ryan David McBride: Great. Okay. Well, like to thank Dr. Nelson again. And there's a lot of claws going on.

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Sarah Nelson: Thank you guys.

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Ryan David McBride: Um, but yeah, we're gonna have to get back to the Michie grad Symposium, which is also

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Ryan David McBride: Happening so

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Sarah Nelson: Yes, good luck on all your posters everybody who's presenting

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Ryan David McBride: Yes. So good luck and thank you again. Dr. Nelson and we will hopefully see you soon, hopefully when this is all over you can come up and visit and see our facilities.

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Sarah Nelson: I hope so. I'm looking forward to it.

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Ryan David McBride: Okay. Thanks again.

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Ryan David McBride: Okay, thank you.