Plasma-based particle acceleration and laboratory astrophysics
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TDLI Meeting Room N601 (East Wing of Floor 6, North Building)
Plasma-based wakefield accelerators driven by intense lasers can accelerate electrons or positrons with extremely high gradients compared with conventional radio-frequency accelerators. However, for their use in forefront applications, beams with high properties are required. In this talk, I will report the demonstration of high-throughput external injection and phase space manipulation of electron beams in laser plasma accelerators. These works can significantly improve the beam property, thus paving the way for future plasma-based advanced light sources and energy-frontier colliders. In addition to driving plasma wakefields, the interaction of intense lasers with plasmas can create extreme physical conditions suitable for studying astrophysical phenomena in the laboratory. In this context, I will present the experimental results that show the formation and evolution of self-generated magnetic fields due to thermal Weibel instability, which are observed with unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution using ultrafast electron probing. This work offers a possible solution towards revealing the origin of cosmic magnetic fields.
Dr. Yipeng Wu received his Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University in 2019. Since January 2020, he has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on plasma-based particle acceleration, laboratory astrophysics, and nonlinear optics. He has published near 40 peer reviewed papers, including 7 in Physical Review Letters, 1 each in Nature Physics, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, and PNAS. His work has been selected as “Nomination for China’s Top 10 Optical Breakthroughs in 2021”. He has also received several awards, including Tsinghua University’s Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award, Cai Shidong Award for Plasma Physics, John Dawson Thesis Prize, and IEEE Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Doctoral Student Award.
