Academic users of the University of Rochester’s Omega laser expressed alarm at the Trump administration’s proposal to close the device in three years; they warn that closure will devastate the growing field of high-energy-density (HED) physics and cripple the training of scientists who are required to maintain the nuclear weapons arsenal. The winding down of Omega is the most striking feature of a 20% proposed overall cut to the Department of Energy’s inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program for fiscal year 2019. The cut also entails a 70% reduction to ICF efforts to attain ignition, the point at which the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining.
Roberto Mancini of the University of Nevada, Reno, who chairs the 400-member Omega users’ group, says that experiments on the laser cover topics such as laboratory astrophysics, radiation hydrodynamics, atomic and nuclear physics, materials and equations of state under extreme conditions, relativistic laser–plasma interactions, magnetized plasmas, and...
