Matthew Beidler
Matthew Beidler, a physicist in the Fusion Energy Division, started on a research path at a very young age.
“My parents like to remind me that when I was 2 or 3, I took tissues and put them on top of a lamp on the light bulb,” he said. “I was always doing little experiments, seeing what would happen, and sometimes setting things on fire.
“As I got older, I was always taking apart motors of little mechanical things, splicing things together and blowing fuses — just trying to figure things out.”
When the Erie, Pennsylvania, native reached his junior year of high school, he took all the available physics courses in one year. When the topic of fusion energy came up, Beidler was intrigued.
“This huge amount of energy is just waiting to be unlocked,” he said. “This is an interesting problem, a hard problem.
“That’s what physicists and scientists love to do, though — they find something that they don’t understand and then say, ‘Let’s figure this out.’”
Beidler’s Early Career Research Program award project aims to develop a model to predict and prevent runaway electrons in the burning plasma of the international ITER fusion reactor. If the plasma rapidly loses confinement, high-energy particles moving at nearly the speed of light can escape and damage the device.
By pairing computer codes focused on the movement of individual particles with codes focused on how the plasma as a whole is behaving and reacting, Beidler seeks to create a self-consistently coupled kinetic–fluid hybrid model that can predict and mitigate potential damage.
“In an experiment, you have many things going on, but you only have the ability to look at a limited number of these things. How do you get a full picture of a system that is changing and evolving?
“Having a sophisticated model is essentially running a virtual experiment — you can pick apart the details and see all these different aspects. In the virtual world, you can do that more readily.”
Beidler said that ORNL provides the right environment to crack this problem.
“My expertise is focused on the physics, but I know that to solve this problem I’m also going to need to take advantage of ORNL’s world-leading computing facilities. Now with the award resources, I’ll be able to assemble and lead a team with expertise in both — something that the national lab environment really makes possible.”
