David A. Hammer

Dr. Hammer is the J. Carlton Ward Professor of Nuclear Energy Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has been on the Cornell faculty since 1977. Hammer worked at the Naval Research Laboratory in 1969-1976, was a Visiting Associate Professor (part time) at the University of Maryland in 1973-1976, and was an Associate Professor at UCLA in 1977; in 1983-84 and 1991, he was a Visiting Senior Fellow at Imperial College, London. He has been a consultant to several corporations and government laboratories.

Dr. Hammer has authored or co-authored about 105 articles that have appeared in refereed journals and about 50 that have been published in conference proceedings. He holds a patent on the x-pinch x-ray source for application to lithography in microelectronics manufacturing. His research is supported by DOE and Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque.

Dr. Hammer is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and a Fellow of IEEE. He is the Chair-Elect of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in 2003, and will be the Chair of the division in 2004.

1. Intense pulsed light ion beams for application to magnetic confinement fusion: we study intense ion beam generation technology and physics, and intense ion beam interaction with gases and plasmas.

2. High energy density plasmas: we study the dynamics of fine wires exploded by short high current pulses. Experiments carried out with single wires are investigating the physical processes of the wires during the explosion process. Experiments with 2-4 wires that cross and touch in the middle, in the form of an X, are used to generate very high intensity x-ray spots. Experiments with multiple wire arrays are intended to study the dynamics of the plasmas that form around the wires as they interact with each other. Many of these experiments address questions related to inertial confinement fusion.

3. Plasma measurements by optical techniques: we use the techniques of visible light and x-ray spectroscopy, laser-based diagnostic methods and advanced electro-optical instruments to study the properties of dense plasmas without perturbing them; we develop new diagnostic techniques for dense plasmas using these methods.

4. We use the tiny plasma source generated by the X pinch (see item 2) to study the properties of near-solid-density plasmas at 10,000,000 K. We are also developing this source for possible application to biomedical radiography.

1. "Ion Ring Studies for Magnetic Fusion Application," D.A. Hammer, E. Schamiloglu, J.B. Greenly and R.N. Sudan, in Proc. 7th Int. Conf. on High Power Particle Beams, J. W. Bauer and W. Schmidt, Eds., (Kfk, Karlsruhe, 1988), p. 665.

2. "X-Pinch Soft X-Ray Source for Microlithography," D.A. Hammer, D.H. Kalantar, K.C. Mittal, and N. Qi, Appl. Phys. Lett. 57, 2083 (1990).

3. "Observation of a Stable Dense Core within an Unstable Coronal Plasma in Wire-initiated Dense Z-pinch Experiments," D.H. Kalantar and D.A. Hammer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 3806 (1993).

4. "Multiphase Foam-like Structure of Exploding Wire Cores," S.A. Pikuz, T.A. Shelkovenko, D.B. Sinars, J.B. Greenly, Y.S. Dimant and D.A. Hammer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 4313 (1999).

5. "High Energy Density Z-Pinch Plasma Conditions with Picosecond Time Resolution," S.A. Pikuz, D.B. Sinars, T.A. Shelkovenko, K.M. Chandler, D.A. Hammer, G.V. Ivanenkov, W. Stepniewski, and I. Yu. Skobelev, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 035003 (2002).