Meet the Experts: Issa Tamer, Laser Physicist

I'm Issa Tamer a laser physicist in the advanced Photon Technologies program or apt for short in different Photon science directorate I remember being a teenager in high school and I was pretty lost regarding what I wanted to study for my future career path I was interested in science and technology in general but uh no specific field really feel really quick with me so during that time I also had a side job doing some computer installation and some minor repair and I was at one of my customers house working on his computer and he happened to have a Wikipedia article of the national ignition facility so when I went home earlier that evening I read the article and I was completely blown away that you can make laser systems so powerful for a fusion ignition experiments so from there I immediately decided that's what I want to do I want to be a scientist working in a laboratory that develops high power laser systems at ABT we design and build state-of-the-art high peak power lasers with a focus on operating them efficiently and at high shot rates for these types of lasers they deliver Ultra short bursts of light with Peak powers on the order of one padawad that's 10 to the power 15 watts or in terms of the power equivalent it's the amount of sunlight that reaches California and Nevada combined in a single pulse so you can do some pretty cool things with these laser systems such as accelerating charged particles in a plasma to nearly the speed of light or potentially in the future driving International Fusion Energy Systems advancements in physics specifically they really accelerate technology development and this has a huge impact on our daily lives LML has consistently defined the state of the art in the field that I'm in which is laser physics so they made the first padawat laser there's the construction of course within it facility and nowadays we're over demonstrating the record-breaking pulse energies with unique laser materials so I knew that being able to work with and learn from the leading scientists experts here is going to be tremendous for my growth of the scientists and that's definitely been the case the biggest piece of advice I could give is to get a lot of Hands-On laboratory experience as a scientist you're going to come across many challenging and exciting problems that your University textbooks or even high school textbooks they're definitely not going to be able to prepare you for them by themselves and so having that experience and intuition that you gain from working on various projects is going to be extremely valuable

Channel: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Views: 602

Keywords: LLNL, Computing, Supercomputing, HPC, Global Security, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, STEM, National Ignition Facility, Fusion Energy, Energy, Cyber Security, Nuclear, Lawrence Livermore, Physics

Id: tUeLCri0Kws

Length: 2min 5sec (125 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023