Young investigator award: Assistant professor has received a of $450,000 from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, for his work applying data science methods to plasma physics. Little runs the department’s  which explores the plasma physics of electric propulsion systems for space travel. He was one of 40 researchers nationwide to receive such an award. on the department website.

Technical excellence honor: The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Control Systems Society has named Professor recipient of its 2019 for Technical Excellence in Aerospace Control. Açıkmeşe leads the department’s .

The award is given for “outstanding contributions to convex optimization-based control and its transitions and applications to aerospace applications.” on the department website.

American Physical Society fellowship: , professor and associate department chair for research, has been elected one of 11 of the American Physical Society for 2019. He was elected for his “” research, a type of plasma confinement system that uses an electrical current to generate a magnetic field and could make more efficient production of both power on Earth and propulsion for space travel. on the department website.

UW Notebook is a section of the UW News site dedicated to telling stories of the good work done by faculty and staff at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý. Read all posts here.

Producing reliable fusion energy — the same process that powers the sun — has long been a holy grail of scientists here on Earth. It releases no greenhouse gases, can be fueled by elements found in seawater and produces no long-lived nuclear waste.

The basic mechanism — getting two nuclei that want nothing to do with each other to fuse — is also difficult enough that there’s no danger of a runaway chain reaction. In fact, scientists so far have struggled to create self-sustained controlled fusion reactions that produce more energy than they consume.

����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý researchers have spent two decades developing a novel way to provide plasma stability that’s critical to achieving fusion. With a $5.3 million U.S. announced in May, they will partner with to scale up their “” device in the hopes of achieving a sustainable fusion reaction that might one day power homes or .

“Fusion energy is the ultimate energy source. It’s free of greenhouses gases, and it also has the potential to be a very robust source without the reliability problems of wind and solar,” said UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics , who collaborated with UW electrical engineering professor to develop the device.

It will be the first time that UW researchers have built a fusion device on campus, Shumlak said.

“Researchers generally don’t achieve adequate plasma conditions to produce significant fusion reactions,” said Shumlak. “Our project will be a proof-of-principle experiment, and just showing that the sheared flow stabilized Z-pinch approach scales to higher powers is going to be really exciting.”

Fusion is the opposite of fission, which splits heavier atoms apart and produces the energy that powers commercial nuclear reactors. Fusing smaller atoms together can yield even greater amounts of energy but does not typically produce unpredictable radioactive isotopes or long-lived radioactive waste. The UW’s experiments, for instance, would be fueled by stable and harmless isotopes of hydrogen that are widely available in nature.

The fusion process does produce neutrons that can pose hazards if not properly controlled, but their behavior is well understood. Neutron therapy, for instance, is used to . UW researchers will closely monitor emissions and follow well-established protocols to ensure those levels pose no risks.

Most university research has focused on the basic science involved in creating, confining and stabilizing plasma, which is a basic ingredient for fusion. Often called the “fourth state of matter,” plasma forms when a gas is so superheated that electrons are ripped apart from an atom’s nucleus.

Applying enough energy to this swirl of negatively and positively charged particles can induce the nuclei to fuse. Under the right conditions — which have proved devilishly difficult to create outside of stars like the sun — this process gives off more energy than it consumes.

One problem is that simply creating plasma requires such high temperatures — typically greater than 200,000 degrees Fahrenheit — that nothing material can contain it without disintegrating or melting. One approach to fusion research uses magnetic fields, often generated by gigantic coils that are many stories high, to contain the plasma.

The UW researchers have used a Z-pinch, which is a geometrically simple and elegant approach to fusion that uses an electric current to magnetically confine, compress and heat a long cylinder of flowing plasma. It requires no magnetic coils, which means that the device could be much smaller, cheaper and more versatile than some of the .

One historic problem with the z-pinch is that the interface between the plasma and the magnetic fields is unstable. They essentially try to invert and trade places, just like a layer of water laid on top of a layer of oil will try to flip. The UW researchers have developed an accelerator that manipulates the properties of the plasma itself to create more stable conditions — at least at lower temperatures.

“Sheared flow stabilization uses plasma moving at different speeds in different places to prevent plasma instabilities from growing,” said Shumlak. “It’s something like cars in the center lane of a freeway that are prevented from changing lanes by higher speed traffic on both sides.”

The 3-year DOE grant will enable the researchers to test if the concept still works at temperatures high enough to create fusion conditions, about 20 million degrees F. They will need to increase the amount of energy that has been injected into the Z-pinches they’ve built to date by more than tenfold.

The UW researchers are collaborating with scientists Harry McLean and Andréa Schmidt of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who provide expertise in designing the higher-energy power supplies and detecting neutrons as evidence that atoms have fused.

The team plans to build a new Z-pinch device at the UW by summer of 2016 and run its first fusion tests in 2017.

“Essentially, we need to determine if we can scale the sheared flow stabilized Z-pinch,” said Nelson. “As we go to higher Z-pinch currents by injecting more energy, does it still stabilize and compress the plasma? Or, put more simply, does the concept still work?”

Funding for the project comes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s

For more information, contact Shumlak at shumlak@uw.edu.

“In order to get smaller feature sizes on silicon, the industry has to go to shorter wavelength light,” said , a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics. “Were able to produce that light with enough power that it can be used to manufacture microchips.”

The UW beam lasts up to 1,000 times longer than competing technologies and provides more control over the million-degree plasma that produces the light.

The industry has determined that the future standard for making microchips will be 13.5-nanometer light, a wavelength less than 1/14 the current size that should carry the industry for years to come. Such extreme ultraviolet light can be created only from plasmas, which are high-temperature, electrically charged gases in which electrons are stripped from their nuclei.

The electronics industry is trying to produce this extreme ultraviolet light in various ways. One takes a droplet of tin and shoots it with a laser to make plasma that releases a brief spark of light. But so far this spark is too brief. Chip manufacturers use a $100 million machine to bounce light off a series of mirrors and eventually project the light onto a silicon wafer; each step absorbs some of the light’s energy.

“Over the past decade, the primary issue with these light sources is they just can’t produce enough power,” Shumlak said. “It’s a stumbling block for the whole semiconductor industry.”

Fusion scientists, it turns out, are plasma experts. The hydrogen plasma in the sun is so hot that hydrogen nuclei fuse together and release energy. Scientists around the world, including at the UW, are working to replicate this on Earth. A fusion reactor would use hydrogen as its fuel and emit helium as a waste product, a technically challenging but clean source of energy.

The UW group’s specialty is a that uses currents flowing through the material, rather than giant magnets, to contain the million-degree plasma. Their method also produces plasma that is stable and long-lived.

“It’s a completely different way to make the plasma that gives you much more control,” said , a UW research associate professor of electrical engineering.

They may have found that application in the microchip industry. Light produced through techniques now being considered by the chip industry generate a spark that lasts just 20 to 50 nanoseconds. Zplasma’s light beam lasts 20 to 50 millionths of a second, about 1,000 times longer.

“That translates directly into more light output, more power depositing on the wafer, such that you can move it through in some reasonable amount of time,” Shumlak said.

An initial grant from the UW’s allowed the team to verify that it could produce 13.5-nanometer light. A gift last fall from the helped the team shrink the equipment from the size of a broomstick to a new version the size of a pin, which can produce a sharp beam.

The company was established last year with help from the UW’s Center for Commercialization and , a technology entrepreneur who met the researchers through the center’s program. Berg is now CEO of Zplasma.

The company is seeking “smart money” from corporate investors who can integrate the new technology with existing industrial processes.

“I hope this gets implemented into the industry and has an impact,” Shumlak said.

The group will continue its fusion research project funded by the . Raymond Golingo, a UW research scientist in aeronautics and astronautics, is co-author of the patent for the technology issued in 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5aHcmTkSPU

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For more information, contact Shumlak at 206-616-1986 or shumlak@uw.edu; Nelson at 206-543-7143 or nelson@ee.washington.edu; and Berg at henry.berg@zplasma.com.

See also: “,” Xconomy, June 5, 2012