William J. Schill

Harshitha Menon, Charles F. Jekel, Kevin Korner et al.

Today's scientific challenges, from climate modeling to Inertial Confinement Fusion design to novel material design, require exploring huge design spaces. In order to enable high-impact scientific discovery, we need to scale up our ability to test hypotheses, generate results, and learn from them rapidly. We present MADA (Multi-Agent Design Assistant), a Large Language Model (LLM) powered multi-agent framework that coordinates specialized agents for complex design workflows. A Job Management Agent (JMA) launches and manages ensemble simulations on HPC systems, a Geometry Agent (GA) generates meshes, and an Inverse Design Agent (IDA) proposes new designs informed by simulation outcomes. While general purpose, we focus development and validation on Richtmyer--Meshkov Instability (RMI) suppression, a critical challenge in Inertial Confinement Fusion. We evaluate on two complementary settings: running a hydrodynamics simulations on HPC systems, and using a pre-trained machine learning surrogate for rapid design exploration. Our results demonstrate that the MADA system successfully executes iterative design refinement, automatically improving designs toward optimal RMI suppression with minimal manual intervention. Our framework reduces cumbersome manual workflow setup, and enables automated design exploration at scale. More broadly, it demonstrates a reusable pattern for coupling reasoning, simulation, specialized tools, and coordinated workflows to accelerate scientific discovery.

Meir H. Shachar, Dane M. Sterbentz, Harshitha Menon et al.

Inertial fusion energy promises nearly unlimited, clean power if it can be achieved. However, the design and engineering of fusion systems requires controlling and manipulating matter at extreme energies and timescales; the shock physics and radiation transport governing the physical behavior under these conditions are complex requiring the development, calibration, and use of predictive multiphysics codes to navigate the highly nonlinear and multi-faceted design landscape. We hypothesize that artificial intelligence reasoning models can be combined with physics codes and emulators to autonomously design fusion fuel capsules. In this article, we construct a multi-agent system where natural language is utilized to explore the complex physics regimes around fusion energy. The agentic system is capable of executing a high-order multiphysics inertial fusion computational code. We demonstrate the capacity of the multi-agent design assistant to both collaboratively and autonomously manipulate, navigate, and optimize capsule geometry while accounting for high fidelity physics that ultimately achieve simulated ignition via inverse design.

M. Giselle Fernández-Godino, Meir H. Shachar, Kevin Korner et al.

The ability to predict how shock waves traverse porous and architected materials is a key challenge in planetary defense and in the pursuit of inertial fusion energy. Yet capturing pore collapse, anomalous Hugoniot responses, and localized heating - phenomena that strongly influence asteroid deflection or fusion ignition - has remained a major challenge despite recent advances in single-field and reduced representations. We introduce a multi-field spatio-temporal model (MSTM) that unifies seven coupled fields - pressure, density, temperature, energy, material distribution, and two velocity components - into a single autoregressive surrogate. Trained on high-fidelity hydrocode data, MSTM captures nonlinear shock-driven dynamics across porous and architected configurations, achieving mean errors of 1.4% and 3.2% respectively, all while delivering over three orders of magnitude in speedup. MSTM reduces mean-squared error and structural dissimilarity by 94% relative torelative to single-field spatio-temporal models. This advance transforms problems once considered intractable into tractable design studies, establishing a practical framework for optimizing meso-structured materials in planetary impact mitigation and inertial fusion energy.