Dr. Todd Urbatsch
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Abstract

Los Alamos National Laboratory is a nuclear weapons laboratory supporting our nation’s defense.  In support of the 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 supercomputers. The Radflow Project is maturing a unique spectroscopic measurement that yields a spatially dependent supersonic radiation wavefront profile. The spectroscopic measurement is much more constraining than the typically used radiography, which measures the density changes due to the shock as the radiation wave goes subsonic. Recently, the spectroscopic measurement has been applied to advanced targets with a detailed heterogeneity representing a single realization of a stochastic medium. The Radflow Project also conducts opacity experiments to explain the current conundrum of the experimental iron opacity differing from theory, which is important in modeling the sun. More than that, though, we need to be able to answer these science questions and be able to validate our theory and codes.

Biography

Todd Urbatsch, Los Alamos National Laboratory, currently leads the Radflow Project, which conducts radflow and opacity experiments at the Omega, Z, and NIF facilities.  The first half of his career at Los Alamos involved numerical methods research and large-scale software development.  He was co-founder of the Jayenne Project for Implicit Monte Carlo thermal radiation transport, beginning in 1997.  Urbatsch served as Group Leader of the Transport Methods group and was past Technical Program Chair and Chair of the American Nuclear Society’s Mathematics and Computation Division.  Urbatsch received a BS in Nuclear Engineering from Iowa State University in 1989 and a PhD in 1995 in Nuclear Engineering and Scientific Computing from the University of Michigan.  He spent summers at Argonne National Laboratory-West (currently Idaho National Laboratory), Argonne-East near Chicago, and LANL in New Mexico.  Urbatsch’s PhD dissertation was on the acceleration of source convergence in Monte Carlo and deterministic nuclear reactor criticality calculations.  Urbatsch has mentored many summer students, served on the Board of Directors of the Los Alamos Historical Society, coached kids’ basketball, and is currently on the boards of two non-profits.  He has three kids, one in high school and two in college, and a dog named Repo (Red E Player One).

Thursday, October 31. 2024
4:10 pm seminar

zoom link upon request