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August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
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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.
Bin-Juine Huang (Nat'l Taiwan Normal Univ.), Yu-Hsiang Pan (Advanced Thermal Devices), Po-Hsien Wu (Advanced Thermal Devices), Jong-Fu Yeh (Advanced Thermal Devices), Ming-Li Tso (Advanced Thermal Devices), Ying-Hung Liu (Advanced Thermal Devices), Litu Wu (Advanced Thermal Devices), Ching-Kang Huang (Advanced Thermal Devices), I-Fee Chen (Advanced Thermal Devices), Che-Hao Lin (Advanced Thermal Devices), T.R. Tseng (Mastek Technologies), Fang-Wei Kang (Mastek Technologies), Tan-Feng Tsai (Mastek Technologies), Kuan-Che Lan (Nat'l Tsing Hua Univ.), Yi-Tung Chen (Univ. Nevada, Las Vegas), Mou-Yung Liao (Nat'l Taiwan Univ.), Li Xu (Nat'l Taiwan Univ.), Sih-Li Chen (Nat'l Taiwan Univ.), Robert William Greenyer (Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project)
Transactions | Volume 130 | Number 1 | June 2024 | Pages 596-599
