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Contact: Yogendra Gupta, 509-335-7217, ymgupta@wsu.edu

Shock Physics: Power, Pressure, and People

Professor Yogendra Gupta, head of the Institute for Shock Physics, holds the mangled remains of a projectile that was fired through the lab’s four-inch gun.

When Washington State University's Shock Physics Laboratory first opened a half-century ago, it focused on a fairly new field-looking at what happens to an object under intense, immediate pressure. Bright graduate students brainstormed exotic experiments which they fired through a 40-foot-long gas gun housed in the basement of the Physical Sciences Building. High pressure and short timescales were the key ingredients.

Back then, the program was supported by national defense money, had ties to the nuclear industry, and produced scientists who went on to work at national laboratories like Sandia, Livermore, and Los Alamos.

Today the guns are still in the basement. The students are still concocting complex experiments. And the lab still has ties to the keepers of the nation's nuclear stockpile. What has changed is the notion of what is fast and what is short.

The laboratory has evolved into a large institute with its own $12.4-million building. It encompasses a cadre of top scientists and some of the newest and best equipment, cameras, and computers for the research field and now gets millions of dollars in federal research support. Most recently, it received an $18-million extension on a Department of Energy grant and $6.5 million from the Office of Naval Research to expand applied shock research to Spokane.

"This is truly a multidisciplinary research organization," says Yogendra Gupta ('72 Ph.D. Phys.), director of WSU's Institute for Shock Physics. With the scientists and students from the University's physics, chemistry, and engineering departments, and with millions in defense funding for research, "we have a terrific amount of freedom here to do what we want to do." And what Gupta wants to do is conduct first-rate fundamental science, produce first-rate scientists, and perform work in conjunction with the national laboratories.

Read the full story from Washington State Magazine.

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