Lab Astrophysics and High Energy Densities

PhD project for October 2025
Type - Experimental
Funded for some students
Supervised by Prof Simon Bland

Hydrodynamic instabilities dominate material flow at all scales, from the generation of beautiful, yet exquisitely complex nebulae in supernova explosions , to the distribution of nutrition in living cells. Understanding and developing methods to control these instabilities is crucial to many applications, for instance the generation of clean, controlled fusion.
We will use a variety of techniques to generate Richtmyer Meshkov and Kelvin Helmholtz instabilities in shock wave driven experiments on MAGPIE and smaller pulsed power systems, then study their development to provide quantitative comparison to simulations whilst exploring new methods to mitigate the instability growth.

PhD project for October 2025

Supervisor:            Prof. Simon Bland

Type:                        Experimental

Funding:                  Fully funded for UK students

Warm dense plasmas are extremely difficult to model, combining the properties of plasmas with coupling between particles (atoms, electrons, ions) more commonly associated with solids and liquids. One method to produce these plasmas is through the ablation of targets by intense bursts of X-ray radiation.
This PhD builds on previous efforts on the MAGPIE facility to explore the effects of X-ray bursts on solar panels; studying how X-ray energies and intensities will affect the heating and ablation of targets on the nanosecond scale. We will use an array of diagnostics including interferometry, Thomson scattering, X-ray radiography and spectrometry to produce quantitative measurements of the ablating plasmas from different target materials and compare them to cutting edge simulations. This will enable us to better understand the ablation process and optimize it for different purposes such as creating flows of dense plasmas for laboratory astrophysics experiments..