Physics Colloquium with Gennady Shvets

Abstract

Research activities on heavy-ion fusion (HIF) were abandoned over a decade ago, andbrought down to a crawl even earlier. It is easy to forget that in the 90's HIF was considered to be the top contender for developing inertial fusion energy (IFE). This is not surprising: accelerator technology is well-established, and the conversion efficiency from a wall plug to accelerated particles is hard to match, especially at the repetition rates required for IFE powerplants. Moreover, unlike most laser fusion schemes, HIF does not require any damageable optics. One of the often-cited reasons for abandoning HIF is its non-modular nature: testing even the most basic IFE components requires multi-km long induction accelerators. Compact high-gradient collective ion acceleration has the potential for drastic reduction of the driver size -- an important step towards modularity and compactness. I will describe the historical context for such schemes and describe the latest efforts in my group to improve them. In addition to driving future fusion power-plants, compact ion accelerators have many other exciting applications that I will describe. Those range from promising carbon ion radiation therapy in the short-bunch (FLASH) regime to testing space-boundelectronics for deleterious effects from impinging high-energy ions. My group’s efforts on tracking the effects of radiation (as well as other external stimuli) on living cells using vibrational contrast imaging will also be briefly outlined.

Bio

Gennady Shvets is a J. Preston Levis Professor of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Laboratory for Plasma Studies (LPS). He received his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1995. Before moving to Cornell in 2016, he was a faculty member of the Physics Department of the University of Texas at Austin for 12 years. His research interests include intense laser-plasma interactions, plasma-based accelerators, inertial fusion energy, and translational bio-photonics. Shvets is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, and SPIE. 

Professor Shvets originated several key concepts in laser-matter interactions, including: Raman compression of laser pulses in plasmas (presently the leading candidate for producing exawatt laser pulses), novel mechanisms for trapping/accelerating high-charge electron bunches, as well as novel techniques for laser-plasma acceleration of heavy ions. One of his group’s current research priorities is the development of compact ion accelerators that can be used to implode fusion capsules. In addition to plasma physics research, his group is actively engaged in the field of optical metamaterials and has pioneered several important concepts in that space, including topological metamaterials and metasurface-based infrared microscopy of living cells using their vibrational contrast.