Four universities will split more than $40 million in grant funding under a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) program designed to bolster fundamental science applicable to nuclear weapons and encourage students to come to work in the nuclear security enterprise.
This brings the total number of universities receiving funding through the NNSA Stewardship Science Academic Alliances (SSAA) Program to eight, the agency said in a Monday press release.
Three of the four newly anointed centers of excellence will focus on high-energy-density physics. The discipline studies how matter behaves under extremes of temperatures and pressure — conditions ordinarily found only in the hearts of stars and planets, or during a nuclear explosion.
The University of California, longtime manager of the NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a partner on the new management contractor set to take over on Nov. 1, will get $10.5 million over five years for its San Diego campus to manage the Center for Matters under Extreme Conditions.
The San Diego center, led by aerospace and mechanical engineering professor Farhat Beg, will research high-energy-density physics and train graduate students in collaboration with institutions including including the Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Los Alamos national laboratories, and the SLAC National Accelerator operated by Stanford University in Menlo Park, Calif., according to a university press release.
The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will get $12.5 million over five years to manage the Capital/DOE Alliance Center, studying high pressure science and technology under the leadership of research professor Russell Hemley, according to the NNSA.
The University of Michigan will receive $5 million over five years to manage the Center for Laboratory Astrophysics, led by Carolyn Kuranz and Paul Drake. The astrophysics center’s students and faculty perform fundamental research in high-energy density physics, the NNSA said.
With nuclear-explosive tests discontinued in the United States, high-energy-density physics experiments are a sort of proxy for young students who may never observe an actual nuclear explosion.
Meanwhile, Texas A&M University, another partner on the incoming Los Alamos National Laboratory management team, will get $12.5 million over five years to manage the Center for Research Excellence on Dynamically Deformed Solids under associate professor Michael Demkowicz. The A&M center will study how metals, including those produced with new manufacturing processes, behave when they are rapidly deformed: something analogous to what happens to fissile metals such as plutonium and uranium during a nuclear explosion.
“So this center is going to be all about high-speed cameras, acquiring lots of data very very quickly, and developing new tools that allow us to look at the individual features of a material,” Demkowicz said in a Texas A&M press release.
The NNSA’s other SSAA-funded centers of excellence are located at: Cornell University in New York; the University of Notre Dame in Indiana; and Louisiana State University. Texas A&M also has a second center of excellence, apart from the one designated on Monday.
The Stewardship Science Academic Alliances program, created in 2002 and funded through the NNSA Office of Defense Programs’ Science program, has a budget of just over $53 million for 2019: the same amount the Donald Trump administration requested for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, and about $500,000 more than what Congress appropriated in 2018.
