Amitava Bhattacharjee, a distinguished plasma physicist and Princeton University professor of astrophysical sciences, won the 2022 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics. The honor from the American Physical Society-Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP), which is named for a Scottish 19th-century physicist who established the basic theory of electromagnetism, recognizes “outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics.”

The APS honored Bhattacharjee, who headed the PPPL Theory Department from 2012 to 2021, for his extensive contributions to the study of plasma physics, the fourth state of matter. The award cites his “seminal theoretical investigations of a wide range of fundamental plasma processes, including magnetic reconnection, magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, dynamo action, and dusty plasmas.” Also cited were his “pioneering contributions to linking laboratory plasmas to space and astrophysical plasmas.”

“I feel happy and honored to receive this recognition from the plasma physics community,” Bhattacharjee said. “Several of my mentors and teachers received this honor, and I am glad to be in their company. I would not be here without my collaboration with many graduate students and postdoctoral colleagues whose research it has been my privilege to supervise, many of whom are now intellectual leaders in their own right.”

His ongoing roles include leading the Whole Device Model Application (WDMApp), an exascale project that aims to simulate an entire magnetically confined fusion plasma, as well as playing a leading role in the Simons Collaboration on Hidden Symmetries and Fusion Energy that he established as a partnership of Princeton University and an international consortium of institutions. The collaboration aims to optimize the design of twisty stellarators.

He serves as founding director of the Princeton Center for Heliophysics, a Princeton-PPPL collaboration that investigates the impact of the sun and planets throughout the solar system. He is also director of the Max Planck Princeton Research Center, which studies the role of plasma physics in the laboratory, astrophysical and space plasmas.

“My primary focus is on research and mentorship of the next generation of leaders in plasma physics, broadly construed,” he said. “I search for fundamental perspectives on plasma processes in various phenomena in fusion, astrophysical and space plasmas.” 

A team of PPPL researchers won a 2022 Edison Patent Award for inventing a liquid centrifuge with applications ranging from treating waste streams to stopping the spread of invasive species by removing them from ballast water in ships before it is released. “It’s been a pleasure to see this technology, which we’ve been marketing for so many years, honored by an Edison Patent Award,” said Laurie Bagley, head of Technology Transfer. 

The centrifuge uses a set of inner and outer cylinders in which the inner cylinder spins faster than the outer cylinder, along with segmented end caps that also spin at different rates. The device mixes or separates materials more quickly than standard centrifuges and does so without creating turbulence, which could make it useful in a variety of industrial applications. 

“I’m really excited about the technology,” said physicist Erik Gilson, one of the inventors who has taken the lead in promoting the invention. “There are a lot of people interested in cleaning up dirty water, getting rid of plastics in the water, and cleaning up settling ponds where wastewater is just sitting. It’s an honor, and it’s humbling to be recognized,” he added. “To have an idea and see it to the market and be acknowledged for that –– it’s very rewarding.”
  

Liquid centrifuge inventors at the Edison Patent Awards ceremony, from left: Eric Edlund, a former physicist at PPPL who is an assistant professor at the State University of New York-Cortland; physicist Erik Gilson; Phil Efthimion, head of the Plasma Science & Technology Department; and Hantao Ji, a distinguished research fellow at PPPL and a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University. (Photo by Elzbieta Kaciuba Photography, LLC.)
  

The Edison Patent Award was PPPL’s fourth in the past several years. PPPL inventors won the award in 2016 for a method of producing radionuclide molybdenum that could be used in medical imaging; in 2017, for an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) microscopy, EUV lithography, and X-ray imaging technique to etch computer chips; and in 2020, for a fusion-powered rocket engine. 

Jonathan Squire, a senior research fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand, who earned his doctoral degree in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics in 2015, has won the 2022 Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research.

The award from the American Physical Society-Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) was established in 2013 to honor standout industry-wide achievement in plasma physics. The honor, presented at the APS-DPP annual meeting in October, includes $3,000 and a certificate and is named for the late Thomas H. Stix, the pioneering plasma researcher who founded the graduate plasma physics program at PPPL.  

Squire said the recognition is “such a nice surprise, and I feel honored to be associated with this impressive list of previous recipients. Research is a team game, and I’ve been lucky to have fantastic mentors and colleagues, both at PPPL, where the graduate training was so thorough and inspiring, then later as a postdoc at Caltech and here at Otago.”

“Jono is a rising star in plasma astrophysics,” said Amitava Battacharjee, a PPPL physicist and professor of astrophysical sciences who was Squire’s thesis adviser. “Within a half-dozen years of graduation from the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, he has made incisive and original contributions to a wide range of topics, including instabilities and turbulence in weakly collisional astrophysical and solar plasmas, as well as dusty plasmas, in addition to his seminal contributions to the generation of large-scale magnetic fields in accretion disks that earned him the APS Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in 2017.”

Squire’s past honors include the 2014 Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship from Princeton, a 2015 Sherman Fairchild Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship from Caltech, and the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand. Previous early career winners include Ilya Dodin, a principal research physicist at PPPL and a 2005 graduate of the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, in 2014; and Will Fox, a PPPL astrophysicist and MIT graduate honored in 2019. 

When Squire relaxes from theoretically probing astrophysical plasma, he enjoys playing the cello, which he took up at the age of eight, and is a passionate rock climber and mountaineer in his native New Zealand.