Eric Hollmann

Eric Hollmann’s research is primarily in the area of plasma physics in magnetic fusion devices. His work is primarily experimental and dominantly focused on the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics and the PISCES linear plasma device at UCSD. Much of his research is devoted to tokamak disruptions, which are considered a potential stopping point for implementation of power reactors based on the tokamak concept. Eric Hollmann’s work in this area has focused on developing methods to safely shut down tokamak discharges without disruption damage to the tokamak walls, with an emphasis on the formation and amplification mechanisms of relativistic electron beams during tokamak disruptions. Additional recent research projects include: growth mechanisms of nanostructure cones on metals exposed to ion bombardment, reduction in tungsten electron emission due to nanostructure fuzz growth, and the development of laser inverse Compton scattering as a novel tokamak diagnostic. He has collaborated with scientists at many plasma physics experiments around the world, including NAGDIS (Nagoya), TJ-II (Madrid), JET (Culham), KSTAR (Daejeon), and ITER (Cadarache).

Eric Hollmann received his BA in physics from UC Berkeley (1991), MS in aerospace engineering from CU Boulder (1993), and PhD in physics from UC San Diego (1999). He joined the Center for Energy Research at UC San Diego in 2000.

Recent Publications

E.M. Hollmann, I. Bykov, N.W. Eidietis, et al, “Study of argon expulsion from post-disruption runaway electron plateau following low-Z massive gas injection in DIII-D,” Phys. Plasmas 27, 042515 (2020).

E.M. Hollmann, D. Nishijima, M.I. Patino, et al, “Observation of increased nanostructure cone growth on Cr due to grazing-incidence Ta seed atom deposition in a He plasma,” J. Appl. Phys. 126, 073301 (2019).

E.M. Hollmann, P.B. Parks, D. Shiraki, et al, “Demonstration of tokamak discharge shutdown with shell pellet payload impurity dispersal,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 065001 (2019).

E.M. Hollmann, N. Commaux, N.W. Eidietis, et al, “Measurement of toroidal variation in conducted heat loads in locked mode induced disruptions on DIII-D,” Phys. Plasmas 25, 102502 (2018).

Link to All Publications