Compression Science in the 21st Century

The workshop on 21st Century Needs and Challenges of Compression Science was held at The Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from September 23-25, 2009. Sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory, the workshop was dedicated to guiding the vision of performing innovative basic research to help "unlock the fundamentals of how extreme environments interact with materials and how these interactions can be controlled to reach the intrinsic limits of materials performance and to develop revolutionary new materials."

The realization of this intellectual goal and the development of accurate physical models will enable an era in which we have moved from "the science of observation" to the "science of control."

Through a series of plenary sessions, participants helped detail long-standing problems and the need for new diagnostics to examine

• the near-term experimental possibility of DC-CAT (within a few years; coupling synchrotron radiation with dynamic drivers);
• the mid-term possibilities of LCLS (and the future availability of x-ray FELs); and, in the long term,
• the role of multiple simultaneous measurements and how this data, when coupled with advanced physical models and computational powers, will enable an era in which we can predict and control material functionality in the extremes.

The meeting offered multiple opportunities for informal discussions and collaborations.

Five Scientific Challenges

One product of the workshop has been the identification of the following five challenges that capture the scientific needs required to achieving full understanding and that ultimately, support the end goal of moving from "observation to control":

• acquire time and spatially resolved in situ measurements at all length scales (i.e., atomistic, meso-, micro-);
• discover new physics and chemistry in extreme environments;
• incorporate material complexity into multi-scale simulations to achieve predictive capability;
• unify static and dynamic compression understanding across relevant length and time scales; and
• leverage scientific knowledge derived from theory and experiment to the design and control of real materials (i.e., microstructure, defects, etc.).

Questions, more info?

For more info about this workshop or LANL compression science activities, please contact

Tonie Baros
Workshop Administrator, 21st Century Compression Science
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Mail Stop P918
Los Alamos, NM 87545
USA
Phone: 1-505-667-5653
Fax: 1-505-665-3407
Email: barost@lanl.gov