Women in Physics

Welcome back for another week of #WNBiPonWednesday interviews! This week we spoke to Jasmine, a final year undergraduate student, completing her MSci project on inertial confinement fusion. Thank you for your time Jasmine!

As an introduction, what is the topic of your MSci Project and what are you working on now?

My MSci project is focussed on inertial confinement fusion (ICF). We are using a 1D radiation-hydrodynamic code called Gorgon to simulate DT fuel capsule implosions on the scale of the National Ignition Facility seeking to optimise the vast parameter space of the problem, namely the laser pulse shape parameters. Currently, we are working on fine tuning the resolution of the simulations through convergence tests to produce reliable results while keeping the optimisation computationally ‘cheap’.

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Read #WNBiPonWednesdays Jasmine Ajaz in full

For our next interview, we spoke to Ginevra, a PhD student in plasma physics. Thank you Ginevra for your time! Stay tuned for our next interview!

As an introduction, what is your area of expertise within Physics and what are you currently working on?

The title of my PhD is laser plasma ion acceleration for future medical applications. So the aim of my work is to perform experiments that try and optimise the current state-of-the-art laser plasma ion acceleration techniques and there’s several different approaches to laser plasma acceleration. I’m exploring, in particular, radiation pressure acceleration and lysale acceleration. So I do lots of experiments abroad where we have laser systems capable of delivering the energy required for these schemes. And when I’m at Imperial, I normally perform simulations to inform the experiments. The hope is that at some point we will have a laser at imperial which will be able to also performs some smaller scale experiments, which will then be very valuable for the bigger experiments that we do abroad. But as of now, the laser isn’t quite working yet, so I mainly do simulations and calibration stuff here and then I go abroad into the bigger experiments.

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Read #WNBiPonWednesdays: Ginevra Casati in full

We’re back! After a short break we’re really happy to be running our interview series again, with a new name, #WNBiPonWednesdays! To start off this term, we’ve interview Dr. Shivangi Sharan, a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Space, Plasma, and Climate Community. Thank you for your time Shivangi!

As an introduction, what is your area of expertise within Physics and what are you currently working on?

My area of expertise is in planetary magnetism, more specifically, on interior structure determination by making use of magnetic field measurements from satellite missions. I have worked on Earth, Mars and Jupiter and am currently working on Ganymede in my postdoc. The JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) mission to study the moons of Jupiter was launched on 14^th April 2023 and will reach Jupiter’s orbit in 2031. In the meantime, we are trying to prepare for the science that we hope to do after we receive the data from the satellite. One of the main aims is to understand the interior structure of the largest moon of our Solar System, Ganymede. The moon is believed to possess a subsurface ocean that we are very interested in. My work is to predict the magnetic signals we can obtain from the ocean that will help us confirm this layer. (more…)

Read #WNBiPonWednesdays: Shivangi Sharan in full