New Mexico license plates are simple, colorful, and award-winning. In 2017, the chile plate won America’s Best License Plate Award from the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. And in 2024, the turquoise plate was recognized by the Discoverer blog, which stated: “Congratulations to all New Mexicans out there because we believe that your license plate is the best in the country. This is due in no small part to the design’s incredible colors, with its turquoise background and vibrant yellow lettering.”
Most Los Alamos National Laboratory employees, of course, have New Mexico license plates. But only some choose to personalize the text. Here are some science-themed plates spotted around the Laboratory.
“I have been studying isotopes for more than 20 years,” says Anthony Pollington of the Nuclear and Radiochemistry group. “I’ve long been fascinated by the things you can learn from them.” Because New Mexico no longer allows the letter I on plates, Pollington used a 1 instead.
Delta P is a measurement of the atom ratio of plutonium-238 to plutonium-239 after a nuclear test, relative to its value prior to the event. This change, or delta, is an important diagnostic and has been reported in radiochemistry experiments since the very early days of nuclear testing. “As a long-time member of the Radiochemistry Assessment team, I knew I had to give my truck a suitably radchem-nerdy license plate,” says team leader Hugh Selby. “Delta P seemed like the right choice.”
Mike James drives an electric vehicle, but that’s not what the EV on his license plate represents. “I was educated as a nuclear engineer,” explains James, who is part of the Lab’s Nuclear Chemistry and Spectrometry team. “My plate refers to a specific fact one memorizes very early on: the energy of neutrons at room temperature: 0.0253 electron-volts.”
“After years of offroading abuse and weathering, my old Land Rover has become noticeably rusty,” explains Reg Rocha, Nuclear and Radiochemistry deputy group leader. “And when I see it, I naturally think Fe2O3, a main chemical product of iron oxidation into rust.” Rocha says that despite his “somewhat nerdy car-naming logic,” most people in Los Alamos get the reference.
Physicist Jim Hill came to the Lab in 1996 as a post-master’s student and was thrown into the world of nuclear safety. He became particularly involved with one-point safety, a weapons design mandate that requires a low probability of nuclear yield in the event of an accidental detonation of a weapon’s high explosives. “It has been a topic near-and-dear to me since I got here,” Hill says. “I thought it would make a nice plate, and it has been a conversation-starter on more than one occasion.”
In New Mexico, residents can submit up to three ideas for a personalized plate. “I filled out a paper form, and one of the ideas I wrote down was SCIENCE,” remembers geophysicist Mike Cleveland. “In a state with two national labs, I didn’t think it’d be available, but a few weeks later, it showed up in the mail.”
Although communication specialist Maureen Lunn’s plate refers to tortilla chips smothered in cheesy goodness, it could be interpreted as a scientific acronym. Researchers in the Lab’s Intelligence and Space Research division developed NACHOS, the Nano-satellite Atmospheric Chemistry Hyperspectral Observation System. The collection of tiny satellites monitors harmful gases, such as pollution from power plants, from space.
Dynamic Imaging and Radiography group leader Keith Rielage started his career as a particle astrophysicist and has worked on several dark matter detectors. “Unlike normal, everyday matter, dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light and can only be detected by its gravitational and weak interactions with normal matter,” Rielage explains. “The composition of dark matter is still unknown, and the universe seems to hold six times as much dark matter as normal matter.”
“My license plate references the fact that my car is turbocharged—it boosts the oxygen in the engine intake,” explains Analytics, Intelligence, and Technology division leader Keith Bradley. “But more importantly, it is an ersatz reference to some physical phenomena that are extremely important to the Laboratory’s mission.”
A while back, retired physicist and history buff Glen McDuff watched a television show about a man who painted nose art from World War II bombers on Harley Davidson motorcycles. “I thought this was a really cool idea,” McDuff remembers. “Then, it occurred to me that the best nose art for my Harley would be from the Enola Gay and Bockscar.” Because these planes dropped the atomic bombs, “why not have a plate that says A-bomb?” McDuff says. “So I had two good ideas in the same decade, which is very rare.”
When a colleague pointed out that McDuff’s Chevy truck with the 500-horsepower, 502 cubic-inch engine is significantly more powerful and louder than his Harley with the A BOMB plate, outfitting the truck with a hydrogen bomb license plate “just made sense.” ★