IST Distinguished Lecturer: Chan Joshi
On Monday, 13th of March at 11:00 am, there will be IST Distinguished Lecturer by Prof. Chandrashekhar Joshi (University of California Los Angeles, U.S.A.). The event will take place in Room 4.41 (2nd floor, Civil Eng. Building) and is co-organized by the Group of Lasers and Plasmas of Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear.
Title: Perspectives on Beam-Driven Plasma-Based Acceleration
Abstract: Particle accelerators have been engines of discovery in our understanding of the Universe and have applications in many areas of modern life from medicine to security. The most powerful ones are 10’s of kilometers in length, determined by the strength of the accelerating electric field. It has been four decades since the concept of using a relativistic plasma wake for charged particle acceleration was first proposed. In relativistic plasma wakes the accelerating electric field can be orders of magnitude greater than in a conventional accelerator with the potential to reduce the size of the accelerating structure. The driver for producing such wakes can be in intense laser pulse or a high current charged-particle beam. During this time ingenious solutions for generating the ultra-high electric field over meter-scale distances, and generating and accelerating high quality electron and positron beams using such wakes have been realized. In this talk, I will give a personal perspective on the progress of the field of plasma-based acceleration driven by ultrashort electron bunches and where it is headed.
Short bio of the speaker: Professor Chandrashekhar (Chan) Joshi, recognized as the father of the experimental field of plasma-based particle accelerators. He started the first research group on Plasma Acceleration at UCLA in 1982 and made landmark contributions to all four avatars of plasma-based wakefield accelerators. Such wakes are now being considered as accelerating structures for the next generation of particle colliders and compact light sources to make these critical instruments of scientific discovery compact and affordable. Over the past four decades Joshi and his colleagues have demonstrated nearly every energy gain and accelerating gradient milestone and high such as ionization trapping, betatron radiation and refraction of a relativistic particle beam at plasma-vacuum boundary. Professor Joshi has been honored with APS-DPP’s Excellence in Plasma Physics Award (1996), Maxwell Prize (2006), IEEE’s Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award (2009) and Marie Sklodowska Curie Award and Medal (2017), Lise Meitner Award (2018) and recently the Alfven Prize (2023) of the EPS. He is a Fellow of the APS, IEEE and IoP and an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2014).