Research Seminars @ Illinois

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Tailored for undergraduate researchers, this calendar is a curated list of research seminars at the University of Illinois. Explore the diverse world of research and expand your knowledge through engaging sessions designed to inspire and enlighten.

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NPRE 596 Graduate Seminar Series - Matt Caplan

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
NPRE 596 Graduate Seminar Series
Location
2100 Sidney Lu Mechanical Engineering Building, 1206 W Green St, Urbana, IL 61801
Date
Dec 3, 2024   4:00 - 4:50 pm  
Speaker
Matt Caplan, Assistant Professor, Illinois State University
Cost
Free and Open to the Public
Contact
Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering
E-Mail
nuclear@illinois.edu
Phone
217-333-2295
Views
8
Originating Calendar
NPRE seminars

How Plasmas Freeze 

Abstract: At sufficiently high temperatures matter becomes fully ionized, but under sufficiently high pressure those plasmas freeze solid. These “strongly coupled” plasmas have Coulomb energies orders of magnitude greater than their thermal energies and can be found in systems spanning electrically charged dusts to the cores of white dwarf stars. As such, many of the physically interesting combinations of temperature and density are inaccessible to laboratory experiments on earth - but computation does not have these restrictions. I will present results of recent molecular dynamics simulations used to study the properties of strongly coupled plasmas, including plasmas at such high densities that they have crystallized.


Bio: Matt Caplan is an associate professor at Illinois State University. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at McGill and his PhD from Indiana University won the 2018 APS Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics. He has broad interests spanning nuclear physics, plasma physics, and astrophysics and received a Cottrell Scholar Award in 2023. Beyond academia, Dr. Caplan is also a scriptwriter for Kurzgesagt and PBS SpaceTime - he has written some of the most popular videos on YouTube about nuclear weapons, and the videos he has worked on have combined view counts of a billion. 

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