Heidbrink

Professor Heidbrink earned his B.A. degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1977. For the next two years he performed industrial research in pulsed power at Maxwell Laboratories. In 1984, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. After working as a staff member on the TFTR tokamak (Princeton) and the DIII-D tokamak (General Atomics), he joined the UCI Physics Department in 1988. He was the 1995 recipient of the Lauds & Laurels award for Distinguished Teaching and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1996. In 2004, he received the Excellence in Plasma Physics Research award from the American Physical Society. He won the UCI Academic Senate's Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching in 2017-2018 and has won departmental teaching awards three times.

Professor Heidbrink studies energetic particles (energies much greater than thermal) in magnetic fusion experiments. Instabilities that are driven unstable by the free energy in the energetic-particle population (either fast-ion or runaway-electron) are a major area of study. Other important topics include diagnostic development and measurements of fast-ion confinement. The research is conducted throughout the world. The DIII-D tokamak in San Diego is the leading magnetic fusion facility in the USA. The properties of fast ions in a spherical tokamak are measured in the NSTX-U device at Princeton and the MAST-U device in England. The confinement of fast ions in stellarators is studied at the Large Helical Device in Japan. He also develops diagnostics for new facilities such as the JT-60SA tokamak in Japan. An introduction to this research area appears in a 2015 Physics Today article. Introductions at the level of plasma physics graduate students appeared in a 2008 review paper and a 2020 tutorial . A new emphasis of his research program is to measure the lifetime of spin polarized fuel since, if the reacting nuclei preserve their polarization, the fusion cross section is enhanced by 50% (for deuterium-tritium reactions).

In addition to his research, Professor Heidbrink enjoys teaching all levels of the curriculum, from large introductory courses to graduate plasma physics. He also trains undergraduates to perform physics assemblies in neighboring elementary schools.

More personally, view his "What matters to me and why" presentation, where he uses swim fins, a Bible verse, a liquid nitrogen cannon, and a Russian clock to illustrate four activities that are important to him.