Skip to main content
Lily Daneshmand in a physics lab

Ever since Lily Daneshmand ’23 (Chardon, Ohio) arrived on campus in the Fall of 2019, she has more than lived up to being a Rickey Scholar.

Her latest achievement is happening now as she is one of the presenters at the 64th annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in Spokane, Washington. The meeting opened on Monday, October 17th and continues until Friday, October 21st.

“There are around 2,000 people participating in this conference from across the nation and even internationally,” she said. “I am very excited to be able to present a poster on the research project that I have been working on with Dr. Joseph Smith for my capstone. 

Her research focuses on computational studies of high-intensity laser-matter interactions. To be more specific, she is examining dimensionality effects on laser-accelerated ions across a wide range of laser intensities in 1D, 2D, and 3D particle-in-cell simulations, which are commonly used to study these interactions.

“These studies are important because while three-dimensional simulations can most accurately model these interactions, they are extremely computationally expensive, so many researchers opt to use lower-dimensional simulations for their studies instead,” she said. “Thus, it is important to understand the differences between three-dimensional simulations and their lower-dimensional counterparts so that we can use these simulations most effectively.”

Daneshmand started her research last spring as part of her Senior Capstone project.