Richard Petrasso

Senior Research Scientist, Group Leader, High-Energy-Density Research
	Email: petrasso@psfc.mit.edu Phone: (617) 253-8458 Address: Room NW17-256 Related links: Physics Research, High-Energy-Density Group

Dr. Richard Petrasso is a Senior Scientist and Division Head of High-Energy-Density Physics at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT. With colleagues and students, he has coauthored over 200 technical papers on plasma physics. His recent work focuses on utilizing nuclear reactions and products for illuminating the basic physics of inertial confinement implosions and of high-energy-density laser-plasmas. In this work he, colleagues and students have utilized nuclear monoenergetic particles and associated reactions to discern fields, areal densities, asymmetries, and other important plasma properties of transient high-energy-density plasmas, be they reconnecting plasmas or directly or indirectly driven implosions. Currently he is the chair, and co-orginator, of the OMEGA Laser Users Group (OLUG), which is comprised of over 300 scientists, students, postdocs from 33 universities, 25 Centers and National Laboratories, and 15 different countries. OLUG seeks, with the strong participation of students and young researchers, to promote collaborations among OMEGA users, to facilitate novel physics experiments at the OMEGA facility, and to transfer and utilize platforms developed at OMEGA to the National Ignition Facility (NIF) as well as to more modest facilities. He is presently the PhD advisor to 8 MIT students who, in addition to working on projects and experiments focused on the OMEGA facility, are deeply involved in the fielding and analysis of 4 NIF nuclear diagnostics, with which fuel and shell areal density, implosion symmetry, ion temperature, proton bang time (from D3He implosion reactions), and primary yield are discerned. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2006). He received his PhD from Brandeis University in experimental atomic physics in 1972, and his B.S. from Oregon State University in 1967.