Faculty

Biography

Hans Rinderknecht received his AB in Physics with honors from Princeton University in 2008, and completed his PhD in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015.  His graduate research studied kinetic effects in plasmas relevant to inertial confinement fusion (ICF).  He worked for three years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow, prior to joining the research staff at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) at the University of Rochester in 2018.  In 2020, he became the first group leader of the Relativistic Laser-Plasma Experiments group.  His scientific contributions to the national ICF program were recognized by awards in 2021 from the LLNL Deputy Director of Science and Technology and the NNSA Office of Defense Programs, and he was named an IOP Trusted Reviewer in 2021.  He received a secondary appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department in 2022.  His work is supported in part by grants from the DOE Office of Fusion Energy Science through the INFUSE program and the NSF/DOE Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering.

Research Overview

Professor Rinderknecht’s research interests include experimental studies of relativistic laser-plasma interactions, high-energy-density states of matter, kinetic physics in plasmas, and inertial confinement fusion.  His research includes relativistic phenomena in plasmas (relativistic transparency, magnetic filament electron acceleration, mega-Tesla fields in plasmas), relativistic plasma optics (structured targets), fundamental plasma physics (shock front structure, collisionless shocks), secondary source development (gamma flash, inverse Compton scattering, THz sources, charged particle radiography), and diagnostic development and interpretation for laser-driven plasma experiments (charged particle imaging, ion-wave Thomson scattering, high-repetition-rate diagnostics). His research includes experiments on OMEGA, OMEGA-EP, and MTW-OPAL at LLE and the National Ignition Facility at LLNL, as well as shot allocations through the LaserNetUS program at the Texas Petawatt Laser (UT Austin). 

Research Interests

• Experimental plasma physics