Prize Recipient

Cameron Geddes
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Citation:

"For experiments and theory leading to the demonstration of high-quality electron beams from laser-plasma accelerators."

Background:

Cameron Geddes is a staff scientist in the LOASIS program of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, investigating use of laser driven plasma waves to build compact next generation particle accelerators.  Such laser-plasma wakefield accelerators sustain much higher accelerating fields than conventional devices, which may extend the reach of high energy physics and enable new laboratory-scale radiation sources.He pursues experiments on control of particle injection and laser guiding to improve these accelerators, and large-scale simulations of the experiments.  Geddes received the Ph.D. in 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by the Hertz and the National Defense Science & Engineering Fellowships.  He received Hertz and APS Rosenbluth dissertation prizes for the first laser driven accelerator where laser propagation was controlled by a  plasma channel, and producing mono-energetic beams for the first time in such an accelerator.  He received the B.A. degree from Swarthmore College in 1997, and received the APS Apker and Swarthmore Elmore prize for work on Spheromak equilibria.  He has twice received the LBNL Outstanding Performance award.  Previous research included Thomson scattering measuring driven waves  in inertial confinement fusion plasmas (1997-99, LLNL), wave mixing (1999, Polymath),, small aspect Tokamaks (1995, Princeton/U. of Wisconsin), and nonlinear optics (1993-95, Swarthmore).

Selection Committee:

Amitava Bhattacharjee, Chair; Richard Berger; Yitzhak Maron; Michael Mauel; Cliff Surko