Jack Davies Hare

Fundamental Plasma Physics Experiments

I study plasmas, the hot matter which make up most of the universe. I am an experimental physicist, so I like being in the lab, looking at data, and saying “huh, that’s odd.” I mostly study high-energy-density-plasmas, which are hot, dense plasmas, in contrast to magnetically confined plasmas, which are hot and sparse, and industrial plasmas, which are often cold and dense.

In particular, I create plasmas using intense electrical currents (around 1 MA), which heat initially solid materials to the plasma state. This processes also generates very large magnetic fields (10s T or more) which accelerate the plasmas to high speeds (100s km/s). These hot, dense, magnetised plasmas are ideal for testing fundamental processes in plasma physics.

In 2021, I started a new research group as an assistant professor at the Nuclear Science and Engineering Department at MIT. We spent three years developing a new pulsed-power generator, PUFFIN, for producing high-energy-density plasmas. In January 2025, I moved my group (and PUFFIN!) to the Cornell School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Previously I worked as a graduate student and post doc at the MAGPIE pulsed power generator at Imperial College London.

You can find out more about me on my old blog fusionandthings.eu, and about my research group on the PUFFIN webpage, including a page on our research and how to apply to do a PhD with me.

Biography

Prof. Jack Hare is an assistant professor in the Cornell School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He graduated with First Class honours in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge in 2011, followed by a Master’s degree in Plasma Physics from Princeton University in 2013. His doctoral research on the MAGPIE generator at Imperial College London was supervised by Prof. Sergey Lebedev, and he was awarded his PhD in 2017. Following this, he held postdoctoral appointments at Imperial College (2017-2019 and 2020) and the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany (2019). In 2021, he started a new research group as an assistant professor at MIT, based around the PUFFIN pulsed-power generator, and he moved to Cornell University in 2025.

CV

You can find my academic (long-form) curriculum vita here.