Location: Los Alamos, NM
Cap-Exempt H-1B Position — No lottery required
**What You Will Do** You will perform high impact research at one of the world's most prestigious and innovative multidisciplinary research institutions supporting our national security mission. The Integrated Design and Assessment (XTD-IDA) group in the X Theoretical Design (XTD) division is seeking motivated candidates for a three-month Post-Baccalaureate Student appointment verifying LANL's charged particle transport simulation capability. This project is a deeper dive from previous projects verifying the charged particle transport (CPT) capability in our codes, based off of analytic test problems that include a cold-beam evolution problem (i.e., slowing-down and spreading out in the velocity space) as it propagates through a thermal plasma; the alpha-particle energy deposition and velocity distribution function evaluation in a burning ball of a deuterium-tritium plasma; as well as two sophisticated problems addressing reaction-in-flight (RIF) physics. The growing body of this verification work, based off these analytic test problems, has errors on the order of a few percent. The goal of this project is to extend into more of these analytic problems; to develop capabilities in the code and to define refinements to the test problems that enable agreement down to machine error or estimated accumulated roundoff error; and to devise "comparison problems" that demonstrate proper code behavior for interesting and more complicated problems even if there exist no analytic solutions. Also, we should be looking for new analytic test problems. Test problems at the integral level can be designed to test unit-physics plus all the interfaces in between. These integral test problems are only part of a broad verification effort that includes unit tests, regression tests, and tests of methods, algorithms, order of convergence, data, runtime behavior, computer science, order-of-operations, and parallel communication. These tests will need to be committed to the common model framew