Dr. Hammett is a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), and a lecturer in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Program in Plasma Physics, at Princeton University. He was selected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997. Dr. Hammett specializes in computational and theoretical studies of the complex physics of plasma turbulence. He and his collaborators developed computer simulations of tokamak plasma turbulence which are successful in matching the core plasmas of a wide range of experiments. Their present work is on improving the accuracy of such simulations and extending them to a wider range of plasma conditions, and on ways to suppress the turbulent loss of heat from a plasma, which could lead to a more economical fusion power plant. His work on fluid models of Landau-damping (which extends fluid equations to the long-mean-free-path limit where traditional closure approximations break down) has been cited in over 100 published papers, finding application to diverse fields such as Alfven turbulence in space physics, Langmuir turbulence in the ionosphere, plasma processing of semiconductors, laser filamentation and other laser-plasma processes, and MHD instabilities, as well as his own specialty of plasma turbulence in fusion devices. He has supervised several Ph.D. students, and was on the executive committee for the national Numerical Tokamak Project, a computational "grand challenge" project which employed the latest in massively parallel supercomputers. Dr. Hammett received a B.A. in physics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences, Plasma Physics Section, from Princeton University.
P.O. Box 451
Princeton, NJ 08543-0451 U.S.A
Tel: (609) 243-2000
