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 170 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 and colleagues 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 with  263 scientists, students, postdocs from 31 universities, 18 Centers, and 5 National Laboratories.  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 small facilities.   He is presently the PhD advisor to 8 MIT students and, in addition to  projects focused on the OMEGA facility and experiments, they 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.