Seminars Archive

Dense plasma investigations on fourth generation free-electron laser light sources

Abstract
The past few years have seen a revolution in the field of X-ray science. The advent of the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) – the Linac Coherent Light Source free-electron laser at SLAC – in one step in 2009 increased the spectral brightness of X-ray sources over that of any synchrotron on the planet by a factor of a billion. Spatially coherent, monochromatic, femtosecond X-ray pulses can now be routinely produced over a wide spectral range, enabling access to spatial and temporal scales of atomic processes in plasmas simultaneously for the first time. Importantly, when focused, FEL pulses are intense enough to create solid-density plasmas at temperatures of several 100 eV on ultra-short, inertially confined timescales, giving us experimental access to extreme states of matter with unprecedented accuracy and control. In this seminar I will review some of the exciting recent scientific advances in plasma physics enabled by FELs, as well as elucidate future research directions and opportunities.