Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
John Lindl
NIF & Photon Science
Dr. John Lindl is chief scientist for the NIF & Photon Science Directorate. In this capacity Dr. Lindl works with the full range of major participants in the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program to develop a national plan for ignition on NIF.
Dr. Lindl received his B.S. in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1968 and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton in 1972. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded the 2007 James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics by the American Physical Society (APS). He also received the Edward Teller Medal from the American Nuclear Society in 1993 and the E.O. Lawrence Award for his work in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) in 1994. He is the recipient of the 2000 Fusion Power Associates Leadership Award and was named an LLNL Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2011 for his extraordinary scientific and technical contributions to the Laboratory and its missions.
Dr. Lindl joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1972 as a physicist concentrating on fluid instabilities and high-gain ICF targets. In 1983, he was named associate program leader for theory and target design in the ICF Program. Dr. Lindl was placed in charge of LLNL's Nova laser program in 1990, with the goal of developing the physics basis for proceeding with a one- to two-megajoule laser designed to demonstrate thermonuclear ignition and burn in the laboratory.
Dr. Lindl's work in ICF has spanned a wide range of topics including high-gain target designs for lasers and particle beams, hydrodynamic instabilities in ICF, implosion symmetry and hohlraum design, high-energy electron production and plasma evolution in hohlraums, and the physics of compression and ignition. A seminal book written by Dr. Lindl, Inertial Confinement Fusion: The Quest for Ignition and Energy Gain Using Indirect Drive, was published by Springer-Verlag in 1998 and has become a widely used reference for the science of inertial fusion. This book, besides being a reference work for the fundamental physics of ICF, provides a summary of the key accomplishments of the ICF program from the early 1970s until the major declassification of ICF that occurred in 1993.
