Past Meetings
Missed a meeting? Read about it here!
Missed a meeting? Read about it here!
6:00pm–7:00pm No-host meet & greet
7:00pm–8:00pmDinner
8:00pm Announcements and technical presentation
Cameron G. R. Geddes
Staff Scientist
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
http://geddes.lbl.gov
Dr. Geddes is a staff scientist in the BELLA center of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, investigating use of laser driven plasma waves to build compact next generation particle accelerators and photon sources. These accelerators sustain much higher accelerating fields than conventional devices, allowing compact machines. His current project is developing compact sources of near-monochromatic MeV photons for nuclear material detection and characterization. Other applications include extending the future reach of high-energy particle physics as well as radiation sources in the X-ray to THz bands.
Geddes received the Ph.D. in 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by the Hertz Fellowship. He received Hertz and APS Rosenbluth dissertation prizes for the first laser driven accelerator to produce mono-energetic beams. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He received the B.A. degree from Swarthmore College in 1997, and received the APS Apker and Swarthmore Elmore prize for work on Spheromak equilibria. Previous research included Thomson scattering measuring driven waves in inertial confinement fusion plasmas (1997-99, LLNL), wave mixing (1999, Polymath), small aspect Tokamaks (1995, Princeton/U. of Wisconsin), and nonlinear optics (1993-95, Swarthmore).
Topic: Plasma acceleration based near monoenergetic photon sources.
Near-monoenergetic photon sources at MeV energies have the potential to provide signification performance enhancements or enable new capabilities in nuclear nonproliferation as well as security, industry, and medicine. Their advantages lie in the ability to control energy, energy spread, flux, angular divergence, and pulse structure to deliver the photons needed for signature generation while suppressing extraneous radiation dose and signal background that is associated with current bremsstrahlung sources. Simulations indicate that dose reductions range from about 2x to above a factor of 50. Photon sources based on Thomson scattering using compact laser-plasma accelerators are being developed to enable these benefits in compact laboratory-scale or potentially transportable packages. The installation of an experiment to test these capabilities will be discussed, including control of radiation dose and beam collimation. The path from near term experiments toward application requirements will be discussed.
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