George Braid

I studied as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, graduating with an MPhys in 2019. My masters project involved the characterisation of a protoype particle detector constructed from off-the-shelf electronic components. In 2018 I completed an internship at the University of Cambridge, studying liquid crystal on silicon devices.

My PhD project is titled 'laser implosion fusion for clean energy generation'. Improving the efficiency of inertial confinement fusion to achieve a net energy gain is a long-standing research challenge. The project aims to develop novel metasurfaces to 'zoom' the laser beam dynamically, and hence more efficiently transfer laser energy to the fuel pellet throughout its implosion. Such technology could also find applications in laser machining and LIDAR. The project is supervised by Professors C. David Wright and Jacopo Bertolotti, and funded by AWE.