Washington State University shock physics researchers to continue overseeing national lab facility to tune of $32.5 million

In 1954, Washington State University professor William Band bumped into George Duvall, considered the father of American shock wave science, at an industry get-together in Seattle.

Band, then the chair of the physics department, managed to lure Duvall to Pullman from his position as director of the Stanford Research Institute within a decade, and in turn, helped establish the school as a preeminent leader in shock physics research.

The university’s Institute for Shock Physics added to its track record last week as the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration renewed a cooperative agreement to oversee the Dynamic Compression Sector at the Argonne National Laboratory. The five-year contract includes a $32.5 million award to support the facility, as well as “the education and hands-on training of the next generation of scientists,” according to a university news release announcing the renewal.

“Our core mission is training people for the National Laboratories, people that can go and take over the job I once held and advance missions,” said Institute Director Brian Jensen. “That’s really our main objective. Fortunately, we get to have a lot of fun doing some of the pioneering science that goes along with that.”

Jensen, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist who stepped into the director role last year, said the agreement will allow his department to continue to provide one-of-a-kind research and training opportunities in the preeminent settings for dynamic compression science, the study of how materials behave in extreme conditions.

The Institute for Shock Physics has a location on the Pullman campus and in Spokane, but also partners with the California Institute of Technology, Princeton University and the University of Texas El Paso to allow graduate and professional students to conduct research through WSU or the National Laboratories.

“Basically we fund the students, they come here to ISP, learn how to do shock physics and then they work with a professor back home,” Jensen said. “So we’re finding ways to put students out into the workforce with WSU resources, as the national leader, and also using our colleagues out of the university to supplement training.”

Jensen said the explorations conducted through the institute span multiple disciplines, like physics, chemistry, engineering or geoscience, as researchers seek to gain better understandings of the ways in which a material behaves in extreme environments “comparable to inside the Earth, or inside the Sun.”

Those extreme conditions in pressure, temperatures and velocity are often mimicked in a lab setting within “guns,” specialized chambers that fire projectiles at speeds greater than 7 kilometers per second, which for comparison, is just 1 kilometer short of the speeds needed for a space shuttle to leave the atmosphere. The material behavior is studied in measurements gathered using high-speed cameras, lasers and sensors in an extremely tight time scale, ranging from picoseconds to microseconds.

“So if we want to understand iron, if we want to see how it goes from a solid to a liquid at core temperatures, we can, in our two-stage gun downstairs, shock it and study how it liquefies under those conditions,” Jensen said. “That’s really hard to do any other way.”

Another example of the institute’s work is the way in which they managed to prove in 2021 that man-made, hexagonal diamonds are tougher than their cubic, natural counterparts.

As reported by WSU Insider, researchers managed to create hexagonal diamonds by blasting graphite discs the size of a dime at 15,000 mph into a transparent material. The impact produced shock waves that turned the graphite into diamonds and then researchers used sound waves and lasers to determine the stiffness. They found hexagonal diamonds to be stronger than natural cubic ones, which could prove valuable in machinery or other uses down the road.

Jensen said shock physics studies are behind advancements in the fundamental understandings and development of technology in a variety of fields and industries, including aerospace, national security, renewable energy and geophysics.

It is an inherently expensive area of study, Jensen said, because “we destroy everything we build intentionally.” That’s part of why the award and associated contract renewal were significant to the university.

“You go through weeks of building an experiment, and then in a hundred-billionth of a second, you destroy everything you built,” Jensen said. “The infrastructure is expensive. We run state of the art diagnostics: the fastest digitizers in the world, fastest cameras in the world. Those we try not to destroy, but everything else is consumable, and so we end up spending a lot of money just getting data.”

Despite the expensive nature of their work, Jensen said the institute’s research brings in around 40% of the funding for WSU’s College of Arts and Sciences.

“Which is great,” Jensen said. “It’s good for the university, it’s good for advancement technologically and it’s a really unique resource for students here to be able to access.”

While the institute has a well-equipped Pullman location, and an Applied Sciences Laboratory in Spokane where investors can contract research, the capabilities of the facility at the Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago are unparalleled, Jensen said. The-state-of-the-art facility pairs extreme condition modeling with leading edge diagnostics like X-ray diffraction to provide data of how materials behave at the micro scale, “where we see how the atoms move to create that continuum wave,” Jensen said.

For contrast, Jensen said typical laser diagnostics, like those used in experiments conducted in Pullman, focus on the large-scale level. The current push in the field is to gather a better understanding at the “meso scale” level, which Jensen described as somewhere in between.

“This is where you have micro scale in certain regions, but you have impurities, grain boundaries, real world materials that are not perfect that complicate the shock process,” Jensen said. “So how do we see the shock wave and understand what’s going on at the scale? We can’t see, so how do we deduce what’s going on?”

Jensen added that the mesoscale, which the Argonne facility’s diagnostic capabilities are key to exploring, “is where all the complexity lives,” and the quest to understand is the driver behind billions in research investments at the federal level. He said the university is “well-poised to lead the community into studying that,” while also helping to fill a shortage of scientists able to step into the National Laboratories.

“WSU is really serving the national need both scientifically and in terms of national missions, in doing something that the rest of the world is trying to do still,” Jensen said. “So I’m really excited for the future.”