Allan Reiman and Douglas McCune of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab were awarded PPPL Distinguished Research and Engineering Fellowships last week.
Reiman, a physicist at PPPL and a lecturer with the rank of professor in the astrophysical sciences department, was awarded the distinction for his role as head of the plasma configuration design group in the National Compact Stellarator Experiment.
McCune, co-head of the Computational Plasma Physics Group at PPPL, was recognized for his work as creator of TRANSP software — instrumental in analyzing fusion plasma experiments.
The fellowships, consisting of a $5,000 grant and increased research independence, are awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy to recognize members of the PPPL staff who have made significant advancements in their fields.
Plasma is the fourth state of matter — a superheated, ionized gas. Reiman said researchers are still "in the development of the fundamental understanding of the behavior of that state of matter."
Researchers and engineers at PPPL and other laboratories around the world are now trying to harness plasma-powered fusion energy to produce electricity.
Reiman's National Compact Stellarator Experiment "would be built in Princeton, making use of a breakthrough new way to combine some of the most desirable features of axisymmetric tokamak devices," he said.
These stellarators are basically "a type of magnetic bottle holding plasma" which do not assume a form of axisymmetry — a shape that is similar (symmetric) when rotated around an axis.
McCune compared the breakthroughs in his field of computational physics in the past 25 years to the evolution of music over the course of thousands of years.
"Suppose," he said, "you had initially had only sticks and tree trunks to beat on to make music. During the course of your life the entire symphonic orchestra was invented, and you got to learn how to play all of those instruments. That is like the breakthroughs we've experienced in computational physics."
The PPPL is widely regarded in academic circles as one of the leading plasma physics research centers in the world.
"The theory group at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory," said Reiman, "is one of the premier plasma theory groups in the world."
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