Berkeley Lab

Virtual Town Hall on Science with kBELLA, 1-3 pm Wed., July 15, 2020

Dear LBNL colleagues,

The Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center invites you to participate in a Virtual Town Hall on Science with kBELLA Wed., July 15th, 2020, 1-3 pm Pacific time.

The proposed kBELLA facility will push ultrashort-pulse, intense laser technology to the kHz regime.  This will enable a wide variety of novel applications. The purpose of this town hall is to engage the LBNL community and invite input on science opportunities at kBELLA.

kBELLA will be a laser and laser-plasma-accelerator facility consisting of a 3 J, 30 fs (100 TW peak power), laser system operating at 1 kHz.  It will be housed in a shielded cave within Building 71, near the existing BELLA facilities.

Laser pulses of the 100 TW peak-power class are drivers for laser-plasma-based accelerators of electrons, positrons, protons, and ions; for laser-matter interactions experiments; and for versatile light sources. These sources include laser-driven high-harmonic generation (from gases or solids), as well as electron-beam-driven production of XUV photons through free-electron lasing (FEL), betatron hard X-rays, Thomson-scattered gamma rays, and single-cycle THz pulses. Sources like these typically excel in achieving strong peak fluxes due their ultrashort (femtosecond) duration, and their intrinsic temporal synchronization lends itself to a host of flexible pump-probe configurations.

Operating such a high-power laser system at 1 kHz will offer game-changing opportunities. By applying techniques such as active feedback, as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, operation at 1 kHz will allow plasma accelerators and other laser-based light sources to deliver unprecedented precision, quality, and stability. Applications that could benefit from this combination of high peak power and high average power include, for example, single-shot phase-contrast imaging (with enhanced statistics or sample throughput rates), tomography, nonlinear XUV and X-ray optics, and pump-probe dynamics studies in atoms, molecules and condensed matter.

Here are some potential parameters (click for a PDF version with live links to the citations).

We seek your input and vision on the breadth of science that can be done with the kBELLA facility. Please consider presenting a few slides on your research and how you think having access to kBELLA would enable significant gains and potentially novel directions in science deliverables.

Next Steps
Please contact us through e-mail if you would like to attend, and note whether you would also like to present.  (Interactive participation is this open forum is encouraged.)  A suggested slide template (showing the points we would like presentations to address) and related guidelines will be sent to those who wish to present.

Here is the Zoom link.

Working Agenda

The Town Hall nominally runs 1-3 pm but we expect a lively interactive discussion session at the end, and have Zoom until 4 pm.  If you can, please consider joining us for that entire period.

Part I: Introduction
1:00-1:20 pm: kBELLA Facility: Cameron Geddes (20 min)
1:20-1:40 pm: Survey of Science and Applications: Jeroen van Tilborg (20 min)

Part II: Open Forum
1:40-2:55 pm. Brief presentations (8 minutes each, 5 minutes for slides + 3 minutes for questions/discussion)

1:40 Antoine Snijders Biology in radiation environment
1:48 Timon Heim Detector development for test-beam needs
1.56 Peter Zwart Bio-imaging
2:04 Dan Slaughter Molecular Dynamics
2.12 Catherine Saladrigas Droplet- and nano-particle dynamics
2:20 Thomas Schenkel Micro-environments in biology
2.28 Ramamoorthy Ramesh Micro-electronics
2:36 Vassilia Zorba Laser applications
2:44 Brian Quiter Nuclear science

 

Part III: Open-mic discussions

2:55 pm-end

Hoping to see you there to explore these exciting new possibilities,
Cameron Geddes, Jeroen van Tilborg, Carl Schroeder and Eric Esarey