The Turn On of LCLS: The X-Ray Free-Electron Laser at SLAC

Promotional image for talk: Elements of a successful scientific talk

Speaker(s): Persis S. Drell

On April 10, 2009, the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser was brought to lasing. Producing an X-ray beam with more than a billion times higher peak brightness than the most powerful existing synchrotron sources, it marked the beginning of a new era of science. Since October 2009, users have been performing experiments at the SLAC Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). This talk will describe the LCLS and its unique new capabilities, followed by some examples of the first experiments, and finish with an outlook of future plans.

Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.