WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $3.2 million in funding for universities, national laboratories, and non-profit organizations to support frontier plasma science experiments at several midscale DOE collaborative research facilities (CRFs) across the nation.
The funding will go to fourteen universities, five DOE national laboratories, and one non-profit organization. The twenty awards made under this initiative aim to increase the participation of U.S. researchers and research productivity in the CRFs. The initiative provides one-time seed funding for short-duration projects.
“Basic and low temperature plasma science is an important area with many scientific and technological impacts,” said James Van Dam, DOE Associate Director of Science for Fusion Energy Sciences (FES). “The research funded under this initiative will enable the U.S. research community to address many fundamental science challenges and help ensure continued American leadership in this critical field.”
This initiative will support external collaborators’ research projects at several DOE CRFs located at the University of California Los Angeles, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Auburn University, DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and General Atomics in San Diego. U.S. researchers selected for funding under this initiative have already secured experimental runtime from the facilities to carry out their experiments.
Awards were selected based on competitive peer review under a DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement titled, “Opportunities in Frontier Plasma Science,” sponsored by FES within the Department’s Office of Science.
Funding totals $3.2 million in Fiscal Year 2022 dollars for projects lasting one to two years in duration. A list of projects can be found on the FES homepage under the heading, “What’s New.”