Abstract: Plasma physics and quantum physics may seem to have nothing to do with each other. However, in this talk I will show that they are in fact closely connected. I will examine three separately topics and show how insight from one field can help with the other. (1) The first topic is laser-plasma interactions (LPI). Conventionally, LPI is studied by solving classical equations. The equations become very complicated in the presence of a magnetic field, which is recently added to inertial confinement experiments to help achieve fusion ignition. In this talk, I will show how magnetized LPI can be tackled, and how the final result can be derived much more simply using Feynman diagrams. (2) The second topic is quantum electrodynamics (QED) plasma. With high intensity lasers, positrons have been created in plasmas. To describe high-energy events self consistently with collective plasma effects, I will show how QED can be turned into a plasma model. The model contains many new ingredients not well-studied in field theories and may shed light on how dark matter could affect ordinary particles. (3) The final topic is quantum computing (QC). Recent advances of QC capabilities make us wonder whether they can be used for plasma simulations, which are often challenging even for supercomputers. In this talk, I will show how we manage to program a toy problem of LPI on quantum devices. The success makes it hopeful that other plasma problems may also be solvable using the power of quantum mechanics.
Short Bio:
Dr. Yuan Shi is a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) where he was a Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to LLNL, Dr. Shi earned his MA (2014) and PhD (2018) in Astrophysical Sciences, Program in Plasma Physics, from Princeton University, where he was a recipient of the Carl Oberman Fellowship. His PhD work was awarded the Marshall N. Rosenbluth Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award by the American Physical Society. Yuan has a BSc from the University of Hong Kong where he was a recipient of the Rosita King Ho Scholarship.