Along with its aesthetic function of helping create the glorious Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, the powerful magnetic field surrounding our planet has a fairly important practical value as well: It makes life possible. By deflecting harmful charged particles from the sun and the cosmic rays...
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicist Craig Siders has been named a senior member of the Optical Society of America (OSA), an international society for optics and photonics scientists, engineers, educators and business leaders. Senior membership status recognizes members with more...
A technology originally developed to smooth out and pattern high-powered laser beams for the National Ignition Facility ( NIF ) can be used to 3D print metal objects faster than ever before, according to a new study by Lawrence Livermore researchers. A team of Lab scientists report the findings in...
In apparent defiance of the laws of physics, LLNL design engineer Paul Bloom leads flying tours through the National Ignition Facility from only three feet off the ground. As creator of the NIF virtual reality (VR) program, Bloom routinely allows engineers, scientists and technicians to soar...
It is 6:30 a.m. when Myrna Gutierrez and Judy Zarco suit up inside the National Ignition Facility (NIF) to begin their 13-hour shift. As radiation control technicians (RCTs), they will maintain the safety of a 10-story building the size of three football fields housing the world's largest, most...
A novel way to harness lasers and plasmas may give researchers new ways to explore outer space and to examine bugs, tumors and bones back on planet Earth. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicist Felicie Albert led an international team pursuing this new regime in laser research,...
A new anti-reflective coating and a novel chemical process for laser optics, developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, represents an important breakthrough in its effort to boost the energy of the National Ignition Facility's (NIF) 192 giant lasers, and cut the cost of...
U.S. Marine veteran Destiny Goddu has spent her whole life working with machines. As a young girl growing up in Livermore, she helped her father, a mechanic, disassemble and rebuild car engines and tinkered with auto parts in the family garage. After joining the Marines, she worked on missile...
Considering that nothing precious comes from an online retailer without protective padding, could precision laser targets also benefit from similar high-tech swaddling? So far the answer is yes, for a group of scientists developing new target technologies for NIF that are intended to neutralize...
While multitasking may be easy for some people (and perhaps hard for others), it can be a particular challenge for the highly specialized equipment used to carry out experiments on the National Ignition Facility (NIF). But TanDM, NIF's new Target and Diagnostic Manipulator, is designed to do just...
