Our group works in the field of Optical High Energy Density Science (O-HEDS), which arises from concentrating multi-joule energy into micrometer-sized volumes using intense lasers. O-HEDS is a young but rapidly-growing field, mainly about studying the interaction between the aforementioned dense energy with atoms, plasmas, condensed matter and quantum vacuum. O-HEDS owes its existance largely to the invention of Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA), which is a Nobel-winning method for generating short pulses of coherent light that are too intense for their own amplifying medium.
There are several grand challenges for tomorrow’s O-HEDS research, including
- Tens-of-GeV Laser Wakefield Accelerator (LWFA) for future discovery science: materials science, molecular biology, medicine, high-energy physics, and et al.
- Femto- (10-15 s) and atto-second (10-18 s) coherent x-ray science on university tabletops
- Generating & probing nonequilibrium states of the quantum vacuum
Currently we are particularly interested in and delicated to
- laser-wakefield electron accelerators (LWFA)
- laser-plasma-based XFELs
We also work closely with some National Labs including BNL, HZDR, and SLAC.