(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has announced a new strategic direction for its NIKE laser-target facility to align its world-class capabilities with the Department of Defense’s (DoD) nuclear strategic priorities.
The new strategic direction marks a shift from the facility’s historical focus on Department of Energy (DoE) missions, specifically those related to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The initiative emphasizes NRL’s commitment to advancing national security through cutting-edge science and technology.
Originally constructed in 1995 with support from the NNSA, the NIKE (pronounced nai-kee) laser was designed to explore the physics of direct-drive inertial confinement fusion in support of the Nation’s nuclear stockpile stewardship mission.
“NIKE is the world’s most energetic krypton-fluoride excimer laser, delivering ultrasmooth pulsed beams at a wavelength of 248 nanometers with 2-3 kilojoules of energy,” said Jason Bates, Ph.D., head of NRL’s Laser Plasma Branch. “These unique capabilities enable researchers to generate strong, stable shock waves and create exceptionally clean experimental conditions for studying extreme physical states of matter.”
For decades, the NIKE facility and its scientific team have contributed to NNSA’s flagship laser program at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which recently achieved its landmark goal of ignition where the fusion of hydrogen nuclei produces more energy than the laser energy used to drive the reaction.
Over the years, NRL researchers have pioneered several critical innovations that have transitioned to other NNSA programs including monochromatic x-ray radiography, the Virgil gold M-band spectrometer, and the flashlamp-pumped disk amplifiers for neodymium-doped glass (Nd:glass) lasers. Nd:glass is a material used in certain high-powered laser systems.
Through the creative work of its research team, and a strategic partnership with the Air Force, NIKE’s capabilities are now being harnessed to address the central science and technology needs of the DoD nuclear deterrence mission.
“This partnership between NRL and the Air Force Research Laboratory represents a vital leap forward in our ability to simulate and understand the extreme environments that nuclear assets must navigate,” Bates said. “NIKE’s unique laser and diagnostic capabilities are unmatched, enabling us to close critical gaps in assessing the survivability of our platforms.”
With adversaries such as China and Russia racing to build similar excimer-laser technologies, maintaining and safeguarding the NIKE facility is essential. A recapitalization and reinvestment strategy is underway to secure NIKE’s future and support the revitalization of the Nation’s nuclear deterrence capability.
“NRL’s NIKE facility is an important national asset with unique capabilities that allow it to serve a broad range of missions supporting stockpile stewardship, fusion energy research, directed energy, hypersonics, and fundamental studies of materials at extreme conditions. Its continued operation for the good of the Nation remains our goal through its new focus,” said Joe Peñano, Ph.D., superintendent of NRL’s Plasma Physics Division.
The Plasma Physics Division conducts broad theoretical and experimental programs of basic and applied research in plasma physics, laboratory discharge, and space plasmas, intense electron and ion beams and photon sources, atomic physics, pulsed power sources, laser physics, advanced spectral diagnostics, and nonlinear systems.
The effort of the Division is concentrated on closely coordinated theoretical and experimental programs in key areas. Considerable emphasis is placed on large-scale numerical simulations related to plasma dynamics; ionospheric, magnetospheric, and atmospheric dynamics; nuclear weapons effects; inertial confinement fusion; atomic physics; plasma processing; nonlinear dynamics and chaos; free electron lasers and other advanced radiation sources; advanced accelerator concepts; and atmospheric laser propagation.
The NRL Laser Fusion Program traces its origins to the late 1960s, when laser-produced plasmas were first used to investigate the effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions. The program was formally established in 1972 by the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor to today’s NNSA.
About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
NRL is a scientific and engineering command dedicated to research that drives innovative advances for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps from the seafloor to space and in the information domain. NRL, located in Washington, D.C. with major field sites in Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Key West, Florida; Monterey, California, and employs approximately 3,000 civilian scientists, engineers and support personnel.
For more information, contact NRL Corporate Communications at (202) 480-3746 or nrlpao@nrl.navy.mil.
###
END
In a first-of-its-kind clinical study, scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas and Baylor University Medical Center showed that patients with treatment-resistant PTSD were symptom-free up to six months after completing traditional therapy paired with vagus nerve stimulation (VNS).
The results of the nine-patient Phase 1 trial, conducted by scientists from UT Dallas’ Texas Biomedical Device Center (TxBDC) in collaboration with researchers from the Baylor Scott & White Research Institute (BSWRI), were published online March 15 in Brain Stimulation.
Dr. Michael Kilgard, the Margaret Fonde Jonsson Professor of neuroscience in the School of Behavioral ...
A novel health-assessment tool uses eight metrics derived from a person’s physical exam and routine lab tests to characterize biological age. It may be able to predict a person’s risk of disability and death better than current health predictors.
University of Washington School of Medicine researchers describe their method in a May 5 Nature Communication paper.
The method, called the Health Octo Tool, might make it possible to identify new factors that affect aging, and to design interventions that prolong life, said the report’s first author, Dr. Shabnam ...
Key takeaways:
Retail pharmacies excluded from Part D networks were as much as 4.5 times more likely to close in the past decade
Growing use of preferred networks disadvantages independent pharmacies, as well as those in low-income or minority neighborhoods
Use of preferred pharmacy networks has soared amid mergers of major PBMs and retail pharmacy chains
PBM ownership of pharmacies has recently drawn scrutiny from federal and state officials
Retail pharmacies excluded from Medicare Part D networks maintained by drug benefits middlemen were much more ...
A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego is making it easier for researchers from a broad range of backgrounds to understand how different species are evolutionarily related, and support the transformative biological and medical applications that rely on these species trees. The researchers developed a scalable, automated and user-friendly tool called ROADIES that allows scientists to infer species trees directly from raw genome data, with less reliance on the domain expertise and computational resources currently required.
Species trees are critical ...
While text-to-video artificial intelligence models like OpenAI’s Sora are rapidly metamorphosing in front of our eyes, they have struggled to produce metamorphic videos. Simulating a tree sprouting or a flower blooming is harder for AI systems than generating other types of videos because it requires the knowledge of the physical world and can vary widely.
But now, these models have taken an evolutionary step.
Computer scientists at the University of Rochester, Peking University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and National University of Singapore ...
Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 5 May 2025
Follow @Annalsofim on X, Facebook, Instagram, threads, and Linkedin
Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on ...
Discovering new, powerful electrolytes is one of the major bottlenecks for designing next-generation batteries for electric vehicles, phones, laptops and grid-scale energy storage.
The most stable electrolytes are not always the most conductive. The most efficient batteries are not always the most stable. And so on.
“The electrodes have to satisfy very different properties at the same time. They always conflict with each other,” said Ritesh Kumar, an Eric and Wendy Schimdt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Amanchukwu Lab at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of ...
TAMPA, Fla. (May 5, 2025) — People living with HIV are less likely to receive potentially lifesaving cancer treatment if they live in communities with lower income levels and educational attainment, according to a new national study led by researchers from Moffitt Cancer Center.
In the study, published in Cancer, researchers looked at cancer treatment records for more than 31,000 adults with HIV who were diagnosed with one of 14 common cancers between 2004 and 2020. They found that 16.5% of them did not receive the recommended first line curative treatment for ...
The Min protein system prevents abnormal cell division in bacteria by forming oscillating patterns between the ends of a cell (“poles”). Despite decades of theoretical work, predicting the protein concentrations at which oscillations start and whether cells can maintain them under different conditions has been a challenge. Understanding these thresholds is important because they reveal how efficient this self-organizing system is in guiding division to the right place.
UC San Diego researchers have engineered ...
Protons are the basis of bioenergetics. We know them, in our everyday life, from the pH values we see on various soaps and lotions. But the ability to move them through biological systems is essential for life. A new study shows for the first time that proton transfer is directly influenced by the spin of electrons, when measured in chiral biological environments such as proteins. In other words, proton movement in living systems is not purely chemical; it is also a quantum process involving electron spin and molecular chirality. The quantum process directly affects ...
