Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Hye-Sook Park
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Citation:

"For generating Weibel-mediated collisionless shocks in the laboratory, impacting a broad range of energetic astrophysical scenarios, plasma physics, and experiments using high energy and high power lasers conducted at basic plasma science facilities."

Background:

Dr. Hye-Sook Park is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She received her BS from Pfeiffer University, NC in 1981 and a PhD from Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, in physics in 1985. She works on high-energy density experiments at major laser facilities including NIF and Omega. Her main research interests currently are studies of materials under extreme high pressure, temperature and strain rates and laboratory astrophysics experiments studying collisionless shocks, magnetic reconnection and turbulent dynamos. In her materials studies, she measures the Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth in metal samples to infer material strength. In the collisionless shock experiments, she employs unique diagnostics to understand shock formation and their products, especially particle acceleration. Before she joined the NIF, she worked on gamma ray burst counterpart searches, ejecta proton radiography, and the CLEMENTINE lunar mapping mission. She is a member of APS and an APS fellow since 2010. She and the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven team received the Bruno Rossi Prize in Astrophysics in 1989 for the observation of neutrinos from SN1987a.