Giving Birth to the Fifth Generation Light Source

In order for accelerator-based "big science" to survive, giving new horizons to essential instruments high energy physics colliders and free-electron lasers, they must be greatly diminished in size and cost, while simultaneously giving ever higher performance. In this talk we trace, through our current experimental and theoretical work at UCLA, progress towards the goal of driving an X-ray FEL with a high-gradient accelerator based on new techniques involving lasers and wakefields. Adding in the theme of employing ultra-high brightness electron beams at low charge, thus entering the attosecond regime, and novel short wavelength undulatory, we will examine scenarios in which extremely compact light sources with unprecedented performance are enabled.

Speaker: James B. Rosenzweig, UCLA