Cormac Hyland

Current research project

XUV Probing of Warm Dense Aluminium

Warm Dense Matter (WDM) is a regime of matter that is of great interest to many experimental and theoretical research groups, as it resides in a middle ground between solid-state physics and plasma physics that is still the topic of much debate. It is of importance as a transient stage of inertial confinement fusion, and the centres of large planets (including the Earth) are believed to in a state of WDM.
In this project, the Vulcan high power laser facility is used to create a sample of Warm Dense Matter, and also to measure its opacity to soft x-rays. This is to address disagreement between a number of theoretical models, and would allow for a better understanding of how matter behaves at the atomic scale under extreme densities and temperatures.

Biography

Cormac graduated from Queen’s University Belfast in 2016 from the MSCi Physics degree programme, following completion of his masters thesis studying “Current Filamentation in neutral electron-positron plasma jets” supervised by Dr Gianluca Sarri. His PhD is funded by EPSRC grant EP/N009487/1, and is expected to finish in early 2020

• Warm Dense Matter

• High Energy Density Physics

• High Power Lasers

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