Events at Physics |
Events on Monday, February 2nd, 2026
- Plasma Physics (Physics/ECE/NE 922) Seminar
- Helios Design: A Practical Planar Coil Stellarator Fusion Power Plant
- Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
- Speaker: Dr. David Gates, Thea Energy
- Abstract: Dr. David Gates, is the Chief Technology Officer at Thea Energy, a fusion technology company leveraging simpler, manufacturable hardware and software controls to create abundant energy. Since launching the company in 2022, David has helped to grow the Thea Energy team to over 70 employees and demonstrated the Company’s core technologies at fusion relevant scale at its headquarters in Kearny, NJ. Prior to co-founding Thea Energy, Dr. Gates was the Head of the Advanced Projects Department of PPPL and the stellarator physics leader at the Laboratory. He also held a joint appointment as a Senior Research Scholar at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. David previously led collaborative efforts with the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Greifswald, Germany and also on the Large Helical Device in Toki, Japan. He served as the Principal Investigator of the ARPA-E project “Stellar Simplification using Permanent Magnets”.
Prior to taking the role as stellarator leader, he was the leader of the NSTX Advanced Scenarios and Control topical science group as well as head of the Magneto-Hydrodynamic (“MHD”) Stability group. He also was a Physics Operator on NSTX. David did his undergraduate studies in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and did his graduate studies at Columbia University where he received his M.S., M. Phil., and Ph.D. in Applied Physics. He was a research associate at Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England from 1993-1997 where he worked on the COMPASS-D and START devices. David was a visiting professor at the National Institute for Fusion Science in Toki, Japan in 2010 and 2011. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013. - Theory Seminar (High Energy/Cosmology)
- Freezing-in the Axiverse
- Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
- Place: Chamberlin 5280
- Speaker: Christopher Dessert, Flatiron Inst., New York
- Abstract: The presence of light axions in the infrared is a generic feature of many ultraviolet (UV) scenarios, including string theory, with the number of such axions N naturally O(10-100). Even when these axions interact very weakly with the Standard Model (SM), the presence of N light axions is constrained by the number of relativistic degrees of freedom N_eff. Adopting an effective field theory approach, I compute the freeze-in abundance of Axiverse axions. Under generic assumptions for the structure of the axion-Standard Model couplings, the predicted N_eff may be already excluded by Planck or probed by ongoing cosmic microwave background surveys like Simons Observatory. Event recording:
- Host: Joshua Foster