Dr. Todd Urbatsch
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico

Abstract

Los Alamos National Laboratory is a nuclear weapons laboratory supporting our nation’s defense.   In support of this mission is a high energy-density physics program in which we design and execute experiments to study radiation-hydrodynamics phenomena and improve the predictive capability of our large-scale multi-physics software codes on our big-iron computers.  The Radflow project’s main experimental effort now is to understand why we haven’t been able to predict opacities on Sandia National Laboratory’s Z-machine.  We are modeling an increasing fraction of the Z-machine’s dynamic hohlraum to find multi-physics explanations for the experimental results.  Further, we are building an entirely different opacity platform on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is set to get results early 2017.  Will the results match our predictions, match the Z-machine, or give us something entirely different?  The new platform brings new challenges such as designing hohlraums and spectrometers.  The speaker will recount his history, starting with one-dimensional Monte Carlo nuclear criticality methods in graduate school, radiative transfer methods research and software development for his first 16 years at LANL, and, now, radflow technology and experiments.  Who knew that the real world was more than just radiation transport?  Experiments aren’t easy and they are as saturated with politics as a presidential election, but they sure are fun.