SLAC Public Lecture | Blazing the path to a fusion future

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Realizing usable electrical power from nuclear fusion has been a grand challenge for physicists and engineers for more than 70 years.  Recently the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has made a major step forward, realizing multi-megajoule energy yield from tiny pellets containing deuterium and tritium compressed by the action of powerful lasers.  The next step is to make the compression to a fusion plasma smoother and more robust.  Here at SLAC, our free-electron X-ray laser LCLS gives us a unique instrument to visualize the compression process, both dynamically on the pellet materials and chemically at the atomic scale. Our program is leveraging detailed, AI-driven simulations. In this lecture, I will describe our experiments, which operate on ultra-fast timescales and at ultra-high pressures, to smooth the path to commercial fusion energy.

About the speaker:

Arianna Gleason received her PhD in earth and planetary science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. After a postdoctoral appointment at Stanford University, she worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the shock and detonation physics group. She joined SLAC in 2018 as a staff scientist. Her passion is visualizing the behavior and response of materials  at atomic-scales in the most extreme environments possible in nature – from planetary cores to stellar interiors. This allows her to uncover nature’s secrets of high-pressure mineral physics and planetary evolution from the atomic level up. In 2019, she received the Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Award in fusion energy science and the United States federal government Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2025, as well as being nominated as a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2025.

As Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the High Energy Density Science Division at SLAC, Arianna leads programs on inertial fusion and seeks to lay the foundation to bring fusion power to our everyday lives.