Archive for April, 2021

On April 30th, at 11 am PST, a recruitment session will be held for graduate students interested in the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Graduate Fellowship Program (NGFP) for 2022. The fellowship seeks highly motivated graduate-level students to grow as the next generation of nuclear security leaders. The one-year, salaried (with benefits) fellowships offer:

• Hands-on experience in nuclear security and nonproliferation;

• Career development, professional networking, and specialized training events; and

• Extensive interaction and collaboration with leading national security technology and policy experts.

Positions are open to students actively pursuing their master’s or doctoral degree as well as students who have achieved their graduate degree within the past 18 months. Details about the program can be found on the web site at http://ngfp.pnnl.gov The current application deadline is October 1, 2021 for positions that will begin in June 2022.

To join the meeting click here.

Steven Gardiner, former NSSC Fellow at UC Davis, now at FermiLab, recently published “Nuclear de-excitations in low-energy charged-current νe scattering on 40Ar” in Phys. Rev. C.

Prof. Robert Svoboda, Gardiner’s former academic advisor, details this accomplishment, “For his thesis [Steven] developed a new nuclear model for neutrino interactions with argon nuclei. This was the first time anybody had really looked at this reaction in such detail, and it was discovered that neutron final states are an important part of the model and cannot be ignored (as was previously done) when looking at scientific sensitivity of liquid argon detectors.”

Gardiner’s important work can be read here.

“Neutrino Detectors as Tools for Nuclear Security” written by Adam Bernstein, Nathaniel Bowden, Bethany L. Goldblum, Patrick Huber, Igor Jovanovic, and John Mattingly, has won the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate Award at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for Excellence in Publication. This article provides a wide reaching summary of the neutrino applications field and was lauded for presenting the potential applications of neutrino detectors in nonproliferation, arms control, and fissile materials security.

Publication co-author Dr. Bethany Goldblum is the Executive Director of NSSC. Other authors represent the CVT and CNEC DNN R&D consortia.

The article was published in Review of Modern Physics (RMP), a top tier journal in the field and part of the American Physical Society collection. The article may be read here. As stated by the Review of Modern Physics website, RMP is “is the world’s premier physics review journal and the most highly cited Physical Review publication. Written by leading international researchers, RMP’s in-depth essays provide outstanding coverage of a topic and give context and background for current research trends.” Colloquia articles of the type nominated here “communicate results at the frontiers of physics, which may impact several subfields.” The journal publishes only 30-40 articles per year and has an outstanding impact factor of greater than 45.

The RMP article was also featured in the new piece, “Neutrino Detectors for National Security,” in Physics Today: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/36