Chaojie Zhang (UCLA): Building a Bright Future for Plasma Accelerators

Thursday 26 Feb 2026, 13:45 → 15:00 US/Eastern

D-122 (SBU Physics building)

Elizabeth Worcester, Valerio Dao (Stony Brook University)

Plasma accelerators can sustain accelerating fields far beyond conventional technology, offering a promising path toward future colliders and next-generation light sources. I will present our recent experimental demonstration of a plasma-wakefield "dual transformer" that simultaneously doubled beam energy (up to 26 GeV) and increased brightness more than tenfold over the state-of-the-art drive beam. Building on this result, I will discuss how plasma accelerators, equipped with a novel staging concept, could enable TeV-scale electron acceleration in a compact setup, and how plasma wakefield acceleration could be integrated with the Electron Ion Collider to enable new high-energy physics opportunities. On the brightness frontier, I will discuss future directions toward ultra-bright beam generation and its applications to next-generation coherent light sources. Finally, I will discuss machine learning as an enabling technology for future accelerator research, and in-situ generation of spin-polarized beams from plasma accelerators.

SBU_Physics_2026_v1.pdf

Videorecording (SBU-internal)

13:45 → 14:30 TBC