Louise Willingale
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
Very intense laser pulses fired into matter can create plasma, a hot gas of charged particles. That plasma can launch bright, tightly aimed bursts of electrons, ions, X-rays and gamma rays lasting only a tiny fraction of a second.
- Fields
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
laser-plasma interactions
plasma physics
high-intensity lasers
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Develop and characterize a charged-particle probe diagnostic at the NSF ZEUS laser facility that measures rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields inside laser-made plasmas.
- Measure the very strong magnetic fields that circle around electron beams driven by high-intensity laser pulses through plasma channels in low-density targets, with femtosecond time and micrometer spatial resolution.
- Clarify how these self-generated magnetic fields shape direct laser acceleration of electrons, bright X-ray and gamma-ray generation, and magnetic vortex ion acceleration.
- Explore arranging the measured fields in a magnetic reconnection geometry, where field lines break and reconnect, for future laboratory experiments.
More about the research
Such beams could be useful across science and engineering. Huge magnetic fields form inside these plasmas and can strongly change how the particles move. However, these fields are hard to measure because they change so quickly and fill such a tiny space.
Why it matters
Laser-driven plasma accelerators could become compact sources of particle beams and high-energy X-rays and gamma rays for science, technology and engineering. Measuring the magnetic fields that control these accelerators could help researchers understand and improve them. The new probing diagnostic will also give other researchers at the ZEUS laser facility a tool for measuring fast-changing plasma fields.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Franklin Dollar
University of California-Irvine, CA·Physics
Use EUV light emitted during laser wakefield acceleration to infer plasma temperature and connect it, through simulations, to the electron charge injected into the plasma wave, in experiments on petawatt lasers such as ZEUS.
Yuan Shi
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Physics
Test the hypothesis that a strong magnetic field suppresses energy transfer between parallel-polarized crossing laser beams while enabling transfer between perpendicular-polarized beams, using experiments at the OMEGA Laser Facility.
Colby Haggerty
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Physics·Early-career
Determine how a velocity shear between neighboring plasma flows changes the rate, outflow speed and heating of collisionless magnetic reconnection, using kinetic modeling and theory.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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