Society of Physics Students presents Dr. Balŝa Terzić - Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director Department of Physics, Old Dominion University.
X-rays enable scientists to see the internal structure of materials on all length scales from the macroscopic down to the positions of individual atoms. This capability has had profound impact on science, technology, and on the world economy. It is impossible to overstate this impact, from Nobel Prize winning science to the everyday dental X-ray. In spite of the huge importance of X-rays in science and commonplace applications, the technology for producing such short wavelength light lags far behind the methods for producing ordinary visible light. First, there are no coherent sources of hard X-rays. Second, the brightest incoherent sources of X-rays are available to only a small number of fortunate experimenters in only a few large synchrotron facilities ($1B scale). And third, all other X-ray work is done with very poor sourced based on technology that is over 100 years old. Inverse Compton sources (ICS) of high-energy radiation are gaining popularity in recen years because of their narrow radiation bandwidth and significantly smaller cost of operation (by at least two orders of magnitude) as compared with synchrotron sources. Enabling proliferation of the ICS into hospitals, industrial labs and universities requires understanding theoretically and simulating numerically existing and proposed ICS. Such tools can accurately quantify and optimize the performance of ICS, resulting in substantial cost savings and extending their science reach. The talk will present some of these analytical tools and illustrate their usefulness and capabilities.
