I’m excited to share that my latest paper, published in Nature Communications with former graduate student Cameron Allen, confirms a 200-year-old prediction by Fourier—this time in high-energy-density plasmas. We observed that heat doesn’t always flow smoothly between materials in extreme conditions. Instead, it can get trapped at the boundary—a phenomenon known as interfacial thermal resistance (ITR).

This discovery has major implications for understanding fusion experiments, astrophysical environments, and why simulations sometimes diverge from real-world data. We used the Omega laser in Rochester, NY, to create temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and track how energy moved (or didn’t) across a metal–plastic interface. It’s an exciting step forward in figuring out how heat behaves in some of the universe’s most extreme environments.

You can read more about it on Nevada Today.