About Us
Vision
Provide Frontier Science for Laboratory Missions: A major intellectual resource to the Laboratory and the nation, Theoretical (T) Division provides creative scientific and technological solutions to challenges important to national and global security. The division pursues fundamental research at the frontiers of science, fostering a stimulating environment that attracts exceptional scientists and creates new skills and programs to benefit Laboratory missions.
Mission
Foremost among T-Division’s directives is its leading-edge contribution to the Laboratory’s national security mission, one implicitly having an enduring need for science and technology beyond today’s frontiers. The division responds to this need in a multifaceted way. We recruit the best scientific minds and capabilities to further scientific understanding of the physical world in order to establish a technical foundation for both current and future national defense, and for industrial and civilian needs. This foundation fosters the exploration of interdisciplinary frontiers of scientific endeavor. In brief, T-Division’s three central mission elements are to:
1. provide the best science and scientists to the Laboratory’s missions,
2. pursue frontier science capabilities for the Laboratory and the nation, and
3. create new scientific directions and attract scientific leaders to the Laboratory.
Core Strategies and Programs
To accomplish its national security mission, the Laboratory has assembled the components of a core expertise by integrating theory, modeling, simulation, and visualization. It is a bold strategy to provide new cutting-edge tools to interpret and guide experiments and to further the fundamental understanding of and predictive capabilities for complex phenomena.
The Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program—the centerpiece of the Department of Energy Weapons Complex—depends critically on the viability of this strategy. However its applicability extends well beyond the stewardship program; in fact, virtually every major initiative at the Laboratory relies heavily, if not critically, on this integrated capability.
This reliance does, however, engender its own challenges. The coupling of computational simulations and experiments as a cornerstone of technical programs—in weapons, threat reduction, biology, nanomaterials, energy, infrastructure, and frontier science—requires a new generation of ideas and concepts to greatly improve the fidelity, reliability, certainty, and usability of these tools.
