Professor Michael Wiescher, Freimann Professor of Physics and the Director of the Nuclear Science Laboratory co-organized the workshop “Nuclear Processes in Dense Plasmas” held at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Many of the open and exciting questions in nuclear physics relate to the nuclear process in dense plasmas. Creating extreme states of matter in the plasma regime is the purview of high energy density (HED) physics. Today there are a wide variety of HED facilities that provide the conditions suitable for exploring questions relating to nuclear physics in dense plasmas. The purpose of the three-day workshop was to bring together the nuclear and HED physics communities and provide a forum for an open exchange of ideas so (1) the HED physics experts understand the challenges confronting the nuclear physics community (2) the nuclear physics understand the experimental HED capabilities that can potentially address their problems. The expected outcome from the workshop would be a white paper describing the important nuclear physics questions and the HED platforms and diagnostics that could potentially provide insight into those questions.