Laser Focused
Alison Saunders ’11 has the biggest laser in the world and a dream: to understand what occurs in the cores of planets and stars.
What happens in the center of a planet or a star? Alison Saunders ’11 is using high-power lasers to find out.
Alison calls herself a laser-driven high-pressure experimental design physicist. At in Livermore, California, she and a team of scientists use lasers to put metals and other materials in high-pressure environments, under conditions similar to ones found in the cores of planets and stars. Using the largest laser in the world, LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, as well as the Laboratory for Laser Energetics’ OMEGA laser in Rochester, New York, they investigate how these materials react to extreme conditions to better understand the behavior of materials at the centers of large planets and stars. This work has implications for understanding material response to harsh astrophysical environments, too, like figuring out how to design the next generation of spacecraft shielding against micrometeoroids.
LLNL also uses high-power lasers for nuclear fusion research. Nuclear fusion is when two light atomic nuclei combine to create one heavier nucleus—a process that happens in the hot, high-pressure environments in the cores of stars. Using lasers, scientists attempt to recreate this process, and for years have been hoping to achieve fusion ignition, which is when a controlled fusion reaction creates more energy than was used to spark the reaction. for the first time in late 2022, a groundbreaking scientific feat, and has since achieved ignition four more times. Since fusion reactions don’t release greenhouse gases or radioactive waste, this breakthrough provides new hope of replacing our power sources with clean energy. Though Alison’s work on the same laser aims to understand different high-pressure physical fundamentals, she finds the nuclear fusion project exciting in general for the world of science. “National labs and large facilities tackle big problems of importance to our nation. Right now, we are using the world’s largest laser to tackle the sustainable energy crisis through demonstration of energy-positive fusion reactions,” she says. “I’m looking forward to seeing what the next large-scale global questions are and how we at the lab will rise to the challenge and lead scientific discovery.”
Originally drawn to physics because of her skeptical nature, Alison at first decided to study the subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a year there, she transferred to Reed and found what she’d been longing for in the physics department: encouraging professors and noncompetitive students. For the first time, in an introductory physics course co-taught by Prof. Darrell Schroeter ’95 [physics] and Prof. David J. Griffiths [physics 1978–2009], she felt fully comfortable asking questions. “I found this community of learners at Reed,” Alison says. “It was so fun, because all of us would get together to work on the homework together. We’d be writing the differential equations up on the board, and it wasn’t competitive. It was really just like, how do we solve this?”
Tags: Alumni, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Research