Laboratory for Laser Energetics

Two awards from the Department of Energy will help Rochester scientists work to develop timely, commercially viable fusion energy.

Researchers at Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics have outlined a method to shape intense laser light in ways that could lead to tabletop experiments to probe the Higgs boson and explore the existence of extra dimensions.

The National Science Foundation has granted its most prestigious award in support of junior faculty, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, to several University of Rochester researchers this year.

Simon Narang, a senior from Pittsford Sutherland High School, was recently named a Scholar in the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search, for a research project he carried out at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

University of Rochester alumna Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD), who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, has been appointed to the Order of Canada for her “extraordinary contributions to the nation.”

Rochester scientists at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics and their colleagues in California and France have directly demonstrated for the first time how laser beams modify the conditions of a plasma.

In a video for WIRED University alumna and Nobel Prize recipient Donna Strickland ’89 (PhD) explains the inner-workings of lasers to five different people: a child, a teenager, a college student, a graduate student, and, finally, to an expert: Mike Campbell, director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

The renewed NNSA agreement brings record funding to the Laboratory for Laser Energetics—$409.9 million for fiscal years 2019–23—and demonstrates the agency’s long-term support of LLE's mission.

Three of eight national research grants recently awarded by the Department of Energy were given to researchers at the University of Rochester, which is home to the largest university-based DOE research program in the nation.

The grant will support research in the growing, multidisciplinary field of Quantum Information Science (QIS), the foundation for the next generation of computing and information processing.