A Ceremony on Issuing Dr. Aldo Bonasera CAS Foreign Expert Certificate

On January18th, a ceremony was held atZhangjiang campus, Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences for the issue of Foreign Expert Certificate for Dr.AldoBonasera. Deputy director, Yu-Gang Ma, on behalf of SINAP, hostedthis ceremony and a seminar on the topic “nuclear physics using laser”.

Aldo Bonasera, a senior scientist at Cyclotron Institute, Texas A&M University, USA,as well as at National Institute of Nuclear Physics(INFN), Catania, Italy, is a famous theoretical nuclear physicist, who is active both in intermediate energy heavy-ion collision and nuclear astrophysics. He published over 200 scientific papers, with total citation time more than 3000, including Physics Reports 243 (1994) 1 which was a highly cited paper in nuclear physics.  Recently, he and his colleagues used a high-power petawatt laser of the University of Texas at Austin toexplode apart deuterium molecular clusters, producing deuterium ionswith temperature around 15 keV.Some of the deuterium ions collided with slow-moving helium-3 nuclei, inducing the D+3He reaction, namely D + 3He fusion, producing high-energy protons and 4He. Then, they measured the temperature, s-factor and cross-section of D+3He reaction in the plasmaenvironment. They published their results in Phys. Rev. Lett.111, 055002 (2013) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 082502 (2013).Their works have promoted a new field of study on nuclear reactions under Lab plasma conditions, which will have a profound impact on nuclear astrophysics, fusion reactor design, and laser plasma, drawing a great attention of international academic circle.

In China, laser nuclear physics is just at its very beginning. In this field, Prof. Yu-Gang Ma and his research team of nuclear physics division is cooperating with Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM), Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai Jiao-Tong University. They have conducted a series of experiments to produce the ion, electron, positron, gamma and neutron spectrum with PW laser, which helped them accumulate a lot of valuable experience and laid their foundation on this direction. Dr. Bonasera has been discussing with them on these experimental data and has been giving his constructive suggestions. On the other hand, they had also a fruitful discussion on the physics opportunity at SLEGS facility on the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) and Free Electron Laser in the near future.