Arniko Meinhold, a 25-year-old physicist making big contributions to science
At 25, Arniko Meinhold, a German and French physicist by profession, seeks to show the world his great advances in science through his learning and knowledge.
Motivated to constantly develop his skills, Meinhold’s contributions to science has given him important recognition by European educational institutions. Furthermore, his works have led him to be published in renowned academic journals.
In this interview , we get to speak about how he achieved a breakthrough for science with the radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) processes of ions and protons. Thus, showcasing himself as a young talent on the rise.
1. Thank you for the interview Arniko Meinhold. To kick things off, how would you describe yourself?
Arniko Meinhold: I would describe myself as a heavy-duty team player with a high frustration, tolerance and endurance. Someone who likes to try different things out and never give up a promising idea. Constantly I rethink subjects, but I am not a machine. I also have a lovely family with a sister and an Indonesian girlfriend.
2. My readers would like to learn a little bit more about you and the young man behind the great advances in science, who is Arniko Meinhold Arniko Meinhold?
Arniko Meinhold: I’m a student and lived 16 years in France and nearly 10 years in Germany. In 2014, I got the “ABIBAC”, the German and French high school diploma and won a first prize at the “Olympiades de physique” a national physics competition in Paris. I published my Bachelor Thesis in physics in 2019 at the Max-Planck-Institute for nuclear physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg and a paper related to that in the Journal of plasma physics two weeks ago.
3. Congratulations! We know physics is a complex subject to understand, how would be the simplest way to explain it?
Arniko Meinhold: Physics is a way to understand nature with mathematical precision. It describes the explanation of causes and relationships in nature. And this is also related to our culture of the Enlightenment with empiricism and rationalism. Nonetheless, it will never be a completely understood area, because of our perception and limited intellect.
Arniko Meinhold explains,
“For example, how would the world be described if we would live in another world or culture or have more natural senses? We can only describe what we already experienced or can be explained with rationalism. But what if there is another way to understand nature? Maybe our mathematical knowledge for describing the world is not fully developed. Or maybe something else related to our physical knowledge is missing. Constantly improving this is the job of scientists and that is the reason why I decided to work in this field.”
4. You’re very young and have completed great accomplishments in this type of work. Tell us more about your contribution to Radiation pressure acceleration of protons from structured thin-foil targets. What was your role and your findings in your project?
Arniko Meinhold: In order to write and publish this paper, I calculated around 20 pages. I ran around a hundred simulations and interpreted the results, adjusted and ran more simulations in order to understand the process of radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) of protons. The simulation code we used is the python code ‘SMILEI’ and this code is used in many other simulations and papers. I found a bug in the simulation code and helped many other scientists in that way too.
“It was a long journey and finally, we finished and published that paper. Although, without my tutor Dr. Naveen Kumar and the infrastructure of MPIK, I would probably not get so far. He instructed and helped me to work into this field of quantum electrodynamics and radiation pressure. That was my best experience in my physics studies”, Arniko added.
5. Subsequently, the process of radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) of ions emerges, what is RPA?
Arniko Meinhold: Radiation pressure is the pressure issued by the exchange of momentum between a light source (by example a laser) and another object (in our case plasma or (heavy) ions). RPA is therefore the acceleration of this pressure. We call the associated force also the force of light. We investigated the RPA of protons (or heavy ions) from thin-foil targets, that means how the protons of a plasma are accelerated from a laser with specific parameters. However, the process is unstable in time and doesn’t have the right ion energy spread for specific applications. In our case, we succeed in suppressing the instability by modulating the shape of the plasma density and surface.
6. Great way to explain it to all of us, how long was this investigation?
Arniko Meinhold: It was the work of around one year of investigation and was continuously improved until the paper was published.
7. Would this investigation be in part a great advancement to science and how so?
Arniko Meinhold: This is a great advancement in the area of RPA. The most exciting findings are the results related to the shape of the modulated density inside the target. We could get an ion energy spread of about 12–13% compared to more than 20%. For the using the RPA in ideal conditions, we seek an energy spread of 5%.
“With this, one can improve for example the proton or ion beam therapy for punctual cancer treatments. But it can also be used in the field of fast ignition in the field of inertial fusion or in proton radiography.”
