MaRIE-PO

The current status of the MaRIE signature facility concept

In March of this year the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) formally recognized a gap in the science capability available for measurements to satisfy the stockpile stewardship mission. This gap in experimental capability exists at the mesoscale.  This is a spatial regime regime that spans the microstructure of many materials of key NNSA relevance.  Whereas facilities such as NIF can address atomic scale materials phenomena and DAHRT addresses integral scale performance there is a gap in the ability to study the evolution of phenomena in high Z materials to nanometer spatial resolution at nanosec temporal resolution.  A plausible technical approach to meeting this gap is a ~42 keV x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) which can produce X-ray pulses at 40MHz for a duration of a millisecond every tenth of a second.

This talk will describe the current status of the MaRIE concept.  It will also describe the key design and risk mitigation activities that will take place over the next few years pertaining to the XFEL  and will describe the relationship between MARIE and capabilities residing in the current LANSCE facility.