Franklin Dollar
University of California-Irvine, CA·Physics
Seeing smaller objects requires shorter wavelengths of light. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light can resolve features as small as molecules and is used to make today's most advanced computer chips, but bright EUV and x-ray sources are hard and costly to build, with industrial machines exceeding a billion dollars.
- Fields
Physics
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
laser wakefield acceleration
betatron radiation
x-ray sources
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- 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.
- Assess laser wakefield acceleration as a practical EUV light source across different acceleration and electron-injection regimes, and identify which numerical models best describe this intermediate energy range.
- Measure how betatron x-ray spectrum and brightness scale with plasma density and acceleration length in two-stage gas cells, aiming to tune the peak toward Beyond-EUV wavelengths used in next-generation chip making.
- Model betatron emission with 2.5D particle-in-cell simulations, Bayesian optimization and particle-tracking codes, and perform single-shot tests of the source for semiconductor metrology using newly built detectors.
More about the research
Two projects examine whether extremely powerful lasers fired into gas can produce such light more compactly. Both rely on laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA), in which a laser pulse drives a wave in a plasma (an electrically charged gas) that accelerates electrons to high energies. Both use petawatt-class lasers such as the ZEUS facility.
Why it matters
Chip makers depend on extremely expensive EUV light sources to manufacture and inspect the smallest features in computer chips. A compact, laser-driven source of EUV and soft x-ray light could offer a cheaper, more practical tool for semiconductor metrology and materials development, including at the shorter Beyond-EUV wavelengths planned for future chips.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Louise Willingale
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
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.
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.
Julia Hsu
University of Texas at Dallas, TX·Materials Science
Design indium-based extreme ultraviolet (EUV) resists, light-sensitive films for patterning chip features, using computational and machine learning tools that optimize both material and device properties.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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