Event
Booz Allen Hamilton Colloquium: "Intense Soft X-ray Laser Beams inTable-top Plasma Based Amplifiers"
Friday, February 24, 2012
3:00 p.m.
1110 Jeong H. Kim Engineering Bldg.
Carrie Hilmer
301 405 4471
chilmer@umd.edu
Booz Allen Hamilton Distinguished Colloquium in Electrical and Computer Engineering
"Generation of Intense Soft X-Ray Laser Beams in Table-top Plasma-based Amplifiers: Probing and Altering the Nano-world"
Dr. Jorge Rocca
Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Colorado State University
Abstract:
Since their inversion more than 50 years ago, lasers emitting infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light have revolutionized science and greatly impacted the way we live. There is now a great interest in the generation of intense laser beams at soft x-ray wavelengths for nano-scale science and technology applications. This talk will review recent advances in the development of compact lasers that generate extremely bright soft x-ray beams from dense discharge created and laser-created plasmas on a table-top. Recent progress includes the generation of intense laser beams with wavelengths as short as 8.8 nm and the observation of lasing at wavelengths down to 7.3 nm. The generation of fully phase coherent soft x-ray laser pulses of picosecond duration using an injection-seeding technique will be discussed.
These new compact lasers are making possible numerous table-top experiments with intense coherent soft x-ray pulses. These include imaging the nano-scale dynamic interactions, probing the composition of materials with nano-scale spatial resolution, patterning and machining nano-scale features, and soft x-ray interferometry for the diagnostics of dense plasmas.
Biography:
Jorge J. Rocca is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Physics. Professor Roccas research concentrates mostly in the development and physics of compact soft x-ray lasers and their applications, subject in which he has published more than 200 peer review journal papers. His group demonstrated the first gain-saturated table-top soft x-ray laser using a discharge plasma as gain medium, and later extended the wavelength of bright high repetition rate table-top lasers down to 8.8 nm using laser-created plasmas, also achieving full phase coherence. He and his collaborators have used these compact soft x-ray lasers to perform nano-scale imaging, dense plasma diagnostics, nano-scale material studies, and photochemistry experiments. Early in his career he was an NSF Presidential Young Investigator. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received a Distinguished Lecturer Award from IEEE in 2008 and the Schawlow Prize in Laser Science from the American Physical Society in 2011.
