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Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
Copper melting behavior at extreme temperatures could inform fusion materials
Using SLAC’s electron camera, researchers recorded timestamps of solid copper atoms (orange) as they melted (yellow) after being blasted with laser heat. This graphic shows how copper atoms changed over a period of several femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), notated here as fractions of a picosecond. Instead of the predicted collapse, the researchers saw a gradual melting. (Image: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has announced researchers have conducted experiments testing how copper melts under extreme conditions, such as those it might be exposed to in a fusion machine. The results, published in Nature Communications, found that a copper thin film was more resilient to melting than models had predicted, uncovering molecular dynamics that had been missing from calculations.
“These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers,” said Mianzhen Mo, the SLAC staff scientist who led the research.
Technical Session|Sponsored by MCD
Thursday, December 2, 2021|3:05–4:50PM EST |Columbia 11
Session Chair:
Xu Wu (NC State Univ.)
Alternate Chair:
Christopher M. Perfetti
Session Organizer:
Brian C. Kiedrowski (Univ. of Michigan)
Student Assistant:
Oscar Lastres
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Depletion Perturbation Theory Sensitivity Coefficients in Monte Carlo Simulations
3:10–3:30PM EST
Benjamin Murphy (Univ. of New Mexico), Christopher Perfetti (Univ. of New Mexico)
Paper
Conversion from R-Matrix to Pole Representation Parameters for Use in Sensitivity Analysis
3:30–3:50PM EST
Matthew Lazaric (Univ. of New Mexico), Christopher Perfetti (Univ. of New Mexico), Mark Paris (LANL)
Solving a System of Ordinary Differential Equations for Reactivity Insertion Accident with Artificial Neural Networks
3:50–4:10PM EST
Alie Akins (NC State Univ.), Ziyu Xie (NC State Univ.), Xu Wu (NC State Univ.)
Quantitative Validation with Bayes Factor
4:10–4:30PM EST
Farah Alsafadi (NC State Univ.), Ziyu Xie (NC State Univ.), Xu Wu (NC State Univ.)
