Awards & Recognitions

Stefan Gerhardt, who heads research operations and serves as deputy director of the recovery project of the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U), the flagship fusion facility at PPPL, has been elected a 2019 American Physical Society (APS) Fellow. The APS annually recognizes as fellows no more than one-half of one percent of its more than 55,000 worldwide members.

The society cited Gerhardt for his “outstanding contributions to the experimental characterization and understanding of the magneto-hydrodynamic [MHD] stability of magnetically confined plasmas spanning multiple fusion configurations.” Such stability describes the properties of the plasma that fuels fusion reactions when treated as an electrically conducting fluid.

The APS honor is the most recent award for Gerhardt, who cited the NSTX-U team that he leads as “marvelous to work with. They’re full of mentors and teachers.” Previous awards include both the APS Marshall Rosenbluth Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Plasma Physics and the University of Wisconsin’s Harold Peterson Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Electrical Engineering. In 2009 he received a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, the predecessor to the current DOE Early Career Research Award, and in 2016 was recognized with a Fusion Power Associates Excellence in Fusion Engineering.

PPPL received six 2019 Federal Green Challenge regional awards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for its sustainable practices in reducing waste, energy and water, and transportation, and for green purchasing and electronics recycling.

The Laboratory diverted nearly 70 percent of waste from the landfill through its composting and recycling program, including 89 percent of construction debris. That amounted to 10.6 tons of waste that did not go into landfills. PPPL’s diversion rate is far higher than the federal requirement imposed by the DOE to reduce waste by 50 percent by 2020.

“These awards are a tribute to the people here,” said Robert Sheneman, head of PPPL’s environmental services division. “They are based on what we do every day, whether it’s green purchasing, using biofuels on many of our vehicles, or making sure that all the electronics we purchase are sustainable.”

Institutions ranging from NASA to the Korean Physical Society have bestowed national and international honors on four scientists PPPL. The awards recognize a veteran and three early career physicists for their path-setting achievements in fusion and plasma science research. The honorees and their notable contributions:

• Rajesh Maingi, head of boundary physics and deputy head of the ITER & Tokamak Department at PPPL, has been named a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the highest membership grade of the society. The Society, with 11,000 members from more than 40 countries, is devoted to peaceful applications of nuclear science and technology.

“This recognition is for contributions in the advancement of nuclear science and technology, an area that is crucial to the advancement of fusion energy, and one that I have given increasing attention over the past decade,” said Maingi, who expressed deep honor for the ANS selection.

Maingi conducts experiments on a suite of domestic and international fusion machines in the area of edge plasma physics and serves as the principal investigator of a U.S.-sponsored international collaboration focused on plasma-materials interactions. These studies include the behavior of components coated with lithium, the characteristics of surfaces made up of liquid lithium, and the effects of lithium aerosol sprayed directly into the plasmas that fuel fusion reactions. Also studied is how injecting various types of impurity powders and granules into a fusion plasma can preserve the plasma’s stability.

• Chuanfei Dong, an astrophysicist at PPPL and the Princeton University Department of Astrophysical Sciences, has won a 2018 Group Achievement Award from NASA that was presented in 2019 for his work with the MAVEN Mission Science Team. The award recognized Dong’s work on computer modeling data aimed at explaining how Mars has lost most of its atmosphere and become a cold, dry planet with an average temperature of 50 degrees Centigrade below freezing. The MAVEN is an orbiter that is collecting data about the upper atmosphere of Mars.

The award is the third that Dong and the team have received from NASA. They won a 2016 Group Achievement Award and a Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement in Science Award in 2016.

Since Mars has no magnetosphere — the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth and other planets — “the solar wind can directly interact with the upper atmosphere,” Dong said, causing the warm atmosphere to disappear. This process compares with Earth, where the magnetosphere shields the planet and keeps most of the solar wind from entering the atmosphere.

• Min-Gu Yoo, a postdoctoral fellow in PPPL Theory, received the Korean Physical Society’s “Young Scientist in Plasma Physics” award for his work as a graduate student at Seoul National University. The research explored the process that converts a neutral gas to plasma that feeds fusion reactions in doughnut-shaped tokamak facilities.

His research shows the limitations of previous theories on how a gas becomes ionized, or separated into electrically charged atomic nuclei and electrons. One major theory, the Townsend “avalanche theory,” holds that ionization occurs when electrons accelerated by an electric field collide with gas molecules and free more electrons, causing an avalanche that allows the gas to become charged.

Yoo found that the theory does not explain results in magnetic fusion experiments done on the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) facility. He and fellow researchers developed an alternative theory that the gas becomes ionized through a turbulent avalanche that produces a strong electric field between the charged particles — a process Yoo calls the “self-generated electric field.”

• Yi-Min Huang, a member of the Princeton Center for Heliospheric Physics based at PPPL and Princeton University, has won the 2019 Predhiman Kaw Legacy Award in Plasma Physics and Fusion Studies. The international award, begun last year by the family of the late Predhiman Kaw, the father of India’s nuclear fusion program, honored Huang “for his seminal work on plasmoid reconnection and instability of line-tied magnetic fields.”

Huang investigates how the plasmoid instability process creates bubbles in plasma that can lead to rapid magnetic reconnection — the process by which magnetic field lines break apart and reconnect violently. His findings have inspired new laboratory experiments and interpretations of satellite data from space. Huang has also made novel contributions to investigating the stability of magnetic fields tied to a boundary, such as the surface of the sun or the wall of a tokamak fusion facility.

Predhiman Kaw, who died in 2017 at age 69, was a physicist in the Theory Department of PPPL from 1967 to 1971 before returning to India to lead the country’s plasma physics and fusion program. In that capacity he led India’s effort to join the international ITER experiment.

Nick Santoro is a military veteran who graduated from college in 2018 and was working as an engineer, but was looking for a job that would allow him to use more of the skills he learned in college.

Bill Harris recently received his master’s degree in engineering after graduating from a five-year program and was looking for a job that would allow him to do hands-on work designing and building components.

The two are the first “rotational engineers” at PPPL. They are in a new program that will allow them to do six month-rotations through four jobs in four different engineering areas of the Laboratory over two years, while learning skills and receiving mentoring. New engineers will be added to the program each year.

Leadership of laboratory experiments that bring astrophysical processes down to Earth has won physicist Will Fox the 2019 Thomas H. Stix Award “for original and seminal experiments, supported by simulations, on magnetic reconnection, the ion Weibel instability, and shocks in laboratory astrophysics.” The ion Weibel instability generates magnetic fields that play an important role in astrophysical processes.

Fox’s work investigates the plasma processes that accelerate plasma particles to enormous energies in the cosmos. He expressed “gratitude to all the people I work with at PPPL, which is a very collaborative place.” The recognition marks the second Stix honor for a PPPL scientist in the six-year history of the award. Physicist Ilya Dodin received the first award in 2014.

The late Thomas H. Stix was a pioneering plasma researcher who founded the graduate plasma physics program at PPPL. His mastery of the behavior of plasma waves helped create the field of plasma science.

Timothy Stoltzfus-Dueck, a theoretical physicist at PPPL, has won a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Award for exceptional scientists in the early stages of their careers. Stoltzfus-Dueck will use the five-year award to develop and test models essential to the confinement of plasma, the hot, charged gas that must be tightly confined in doughnut-shaped devices to produce fusion reactions.

His research focuses on the behavior of the edge radial electric field at the volatile edge of the plasma — a region that strongly determines the confinement and overall performance of the plasma in magnetic tokamaks. Such fields arise from the interaction of conditions that include turbulence and the collision of plasma particles and can suppress damaging disruptions. They are also to also suppress the turbulence that causes particles to leak from the magnetically confined region.

His findings aim to increase understanding of the control of next-generation fusion plasmas. “PPPL is in the middle of the U.S. fusion program and has been a really great place for collaboration with so many top-notch scientists,” he said. “Basic physics understanding is important for predictions for ITER,” he added, referring to the international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the practicality of fusion energy. “Improved understanding could help us spot changes that will occur in such a large device.”

Alexander Glasser, a fifth-year graduate student who arrived at the Program in Plasma Physics at PPPL after nearly a decade working on Wall Street, has won a highly competitive Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University. The fellowship provides full tuition and a stipend for the 2019-2020 academic year for students “displaying the highest scholarly excellence in graduate work.”

Glasser’s theoretical work revises the popular notion of space and time — or space-time — which is commonly thought to be continuous. His interests include creating computer codes that preserve the fundamental physical laws of conservation of energy and momentum in fusion plasmas. The work could help simulate plasmas used in fusion devices and help achieve fusion energy.

Glasser worked as a portfolio manager and director of quantitative analysis at a Wall Street hedge fund after earning his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Harvard University. He later served as director of risk management for another fund while earning a master’s degree in applied physics from Columbia University and with master’s in hand quit Wall Street for the Program in Plasma Physics. “My love for physics recaptured my attention and I wanted to pursue something that was true,” he said. “At the end of any sufficiently long chain of ‘why’ questions you always come to physics.”

Discoveries about the behavior of plasma that composes the sun and stars and fuels fusion reactions have won prestigious awards for two post-doctoral fellows at PPPL. The honors, the 2019 Christiaan Huygens Science Award for physicist Chris Smiet and the 2019 Under 30 (U30) Scientist and Student Award for physicist Rupak Mukherjee, recognize exceptional contributions by the two scientists at the start of their careers.

The Christiaan Huygens Foundation, whose awards “encourage innovative research in the disciplines in which Christiaan Huygens excelled,” honored Smiet for the most innovative thesis in physics in the Netherlands in the past three years. The U30 award for Mukherjee, given by the Association of Asia-Pacific Physical Societies-Division of Plasma Physics (AAPPS-DPP), honored a paper that demonstrates “outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of plasma physics.

Smiet’s dissertation uncovered a mathematical structure inherent in plasmas of all sizes.

“I studied, in a fundamental way, what happens to the linking and twisting of magnetic field lines when they start out as knotted, and I showed that they almost universally take on the characteristics of a very beautiful mathematical structure,” Smiet said. “Understanding these self-stable structures could show us a new way to keep fusion plasma in its place and possibly a whole new way of constructing a fusion device.”

Mukherjee’s award-winning paper, selected as an Editor’s Pick in Physics of Plasmas, describes the evolution of non-linear plasma flows. The research predicts the “good” flows that recur and the “bad” flows that do not. “If we know which flows recur and can experimentally identify those flows, we may predict the short-term future of the system,” Mukhurjee said. “This might help predict disruptions in magnetically confined fusion devices or extreme events in astrophysical plasmas, as for example in the Sun.”