Physicist Vinícius Duarte wins a $2.5 million Early Career Research Award

Vinícius Duarte, a research physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has won a prestigious $2.5 million Early Career Research Program Award sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science. Duarte will use the five-year funding to advance the understanding of processes that lead to the loss of high-energy particles in tokamak fusion facilities. The award is one of 93 totaling $135 million that the DOE has provided this year to recipients at universities and national laboratories. 

“I feel honored and excited to receive this award,” said Duarte, who received his doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 2017 and was a postdoctoral fellow at PPPL before becoming a member of the research staff in 2020. “This will provide the resources for our team to address an important research gap for ITER and next-generation fusion devices.”

Devices such as ITER, the international tokamak under construction in the south of France, combine light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — to generate massive amounts of energy. Scientists around the world are seeking to reproduce and control fusion for a virtually inexhaustible supply of safe and clean power to generate electricity.

Energetic particles

This Early Career Award, which will include support for two postdoctoral researchers, will enable the team to study the behavior of energetic particles in the presence of different types of external heating and different waves that can destabilize fusion plasmas. Efficiently confining such particles will be essential to the design of future fusion power plants, Duarte said. 

His Early Career Award is the ninth won by a PPPL physicist since 2010 and the latest recognition for Duarte, who received the Brazilian Physical Society prize for his doctoral thesis. He began a three-year term on the editorial advisory board of Physics of Plasmas, a monthly peer-reviewed journal, in January of this year.

Duarte grew interested in plasma physics as an undergraduate at the University of Campinas in Brazil. Two factors drew him into the field. First, plasmas combine several physics disciplines such as electrodynamics and statistical physics within it. Second, studying plasmas allowed Duarte to develop and use more physical intuition than the study of other topics such as quantum mechanics or particle physics. “I was very fortunate to be introduced to plasma physics as an undergraduate by a great teacher and mentor,” he recalled. Read more about the 2023 award program here.

PPPL, on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science