Project Grant DESC0022169

This $850,000 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at the University of Colorado Boulder to advance understanding of particle acceleration in plasmas driven by lasers. Specifically, the three-year award will fund simulation and experimental studies of optical field ionization-generated plasma channels for particle acceleration using laser wakefield acceleration. Researchers will conduct accurate simulations of plasma channel formation, characterize generated...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $640,000 Project Grant under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CFDA 47.049) federal grant program to the Regents of the University of Michigan. The objective of this 3-year project is to study how plasma may be used as a space-time varying optical medium to generate new high-power, tunable sources of structured light by upshifting in electron plasma waves with relativistic phase velocity. Key goals include designing innovative plasma...

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund the University of Maryland, College Park to upgrade its existing 100 terawatt laser system to increase output pulse energy by a factor of four. Totaling $155,249, the award under the NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) will support relativistic physics experiments in plasma, nonlinear optics, and laboratory astrophysics through July 2025. Specifically, the upgraded laser will enable tabletop...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) supports a study of the time-dependent formation and evolution of plasmas generated through photoemission driven by ultrafast lasers. The $135,000 award from January 1, 2025 to August 31, 2027 will enable theoretical and numerical investigations into how plasma electrons evolve from an anisotropic velocity distribution due to photoemission to a thermalized state. The research aims to provide...

This three-year Project Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), totaling $300,000, will support theoretical research to develop short-pulsed ultraviolet laser sources. Funded through NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), the award will promote progress in the generation and characterization of ultraviolet laser pulses. Specifically, the awardee will conduct numerical simulations of high harmonic generation in a gas jet experiment to analyze the impact of...

The University of California Irvine was awarded a $636,981 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program to support research into extreme ultraviolet generation and spectroscopy using laser wakefield accelerators. The three-year award beginning June 1, 2023 will fund experiments at petawatt laser facilities to characterize plasma conditions and investigate the potential of laser wakefield acceleration as an extreme ultraviolet light source. The...

This $600,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Physics supports research to develop a high-density, axially homogeneous helicon plasma source for the AWAKE (Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment) project at CERN. The research aims to qualify the helicon plasma generation technology for application in next-generation particle accelerator systems, which could significantly reduce the size and cost of future linear accelerators...

This $500,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) supports research at Princeton University to investigate interactions between structured laser light and plasmas. The university will use high-power elliptically polarized and vortex laser beams to produce plasma harmonics with tunable polarization states for the first time. Two- and three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations will compare to experimental results. The...

Radiabeam Technologies, LLC received a $199,815 Project Grant award from the Department of Energy Office of Science on June 27, 2022 to support development of a hybrid structure-wakefield accelerator with a plasma photocathode through March 26, 2023. The award is being administered under the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program (CFDA 81.049), which aims to deliver scientific discoveries and tools to transform understanding of nature and advance U.S. energy security and economic...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) award under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Federal Grant Program (CFDA 47.049) provides $529,482 to the University of Rochester to develop the theory and simulation of the emergent properties of matter when driven or "dressed" by lasers. The project aims to: (a) Develop a Floquet theory and simulation scheme to model the optical absorption properties of realistic laser-dressed solids, in order to make experimentally testable predictions...