Plasma & laser based compact particle accelerators ft. Jens Osterhoff

In this episode

• How Jens’s team shrinks particle accelerators from hundreds of metres to a few centimetres using high-intensity lasers and plasmas
• What compact accelerators could make possible: mobile cancer therapy, smaller X-ray lasers and more affordable particle colliders
• Why machine learning matters for running these accelerators, and how a national lab and a startup work together
• His path from Würzburg via Texas and Munich to DESY in Hamburg, and now the BELLA Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• The project he is proudest of: FLASHForward at DESY, which doubled a beam’s energy in a few centimetres of plasma while keeping its quality, and tested plasma acceleration at very high repetition rates
• The dream of an endoscopic particle accelerator for treating tumours, and his three wishes: money, time and wisdom

Key Takeaways

• Deputy director of the BELLA Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, shrinking kilometre-scale particle accelerators to centimetres using high-intensity lasers and plasmas, 1 GeV in ~3 cm vs ~100–300 m conventionally.
• Compact/mobile accelerators could enable field science, truck-mounted or endoscopic cancer therapy for less wealthy countries, smaller free-electron lasers, and affordable next-generation TeV colliders.
• Machine learning is central for stabilising and optimising these compact accelerators; ~50 groups worldwide work on plasma acceleration, with Berkeley among the strongest.
• Academia–industry partnership works because national labs provide the expensive infrastructure and companies provide product focus.
• Three wishes: ‘money, time and wisdom’, more time (esp. work/family balance), more funding, and the foresight to pick the right, realistic projects.

Listen on

About the guest

Jens Osterhoff is a Senior Scientist and Deputy Director of the BELLA Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA, where his team works on making large particle accelerators very small. He previously worked at DESY in Hamburg, Germany.

Jens Osterhoff curated the Real Scientists Nano Twitter account (@RealSci_Nano) from July 21 to July 23 2024. Read all of Jens’s tweets from that week.