Gwyn P. Williams

Photo taken July 2008

e-mail Gwyn
Gwyn P. Williams                                                                                                              Phone: (757) 269-7521
Deputy Division Head                                                                                                         Fax:    (757) 269-5024
Free Electron Laser                                                                                                            Cell:    (757) 876-3631
Jefferson Laboratory
12000 Jefferson Avenue - MS 7A
Newport News, VA 23606

 Jefferson Laboratory is in Newport News, Virginia and operates a Free Electron Laser of unprecedented  average power, since it uses superconducting radio-frequency cavities and re-circulates the electron beam.

The Jefferson Lab FEL is a sub-picosecond, tunable light source covering the range from 250 nanometers in the ultraviolet to 14 microns in the mid-infrared, with pulse energies up to 300 microJoules, and at repetition rates up to 75 MHz. Not all parameters can be satisfied simultaneously but average powers in excess of 10 kW have been demonstrated in the infrared.

We also have a high power THz laboratory whose source is the electron beam in the FEL.  This is a broadband source covering the range 0.1 - 5 THz and with an average power of 100 watts.

I am presently the Basic Research Program Manager and Deputy Division Head of the Free Electron Laser facility (FEL) at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. I am also an adjunct faculty member of the College of William and Mary.  Since obtaining my PhD from Sheffield University in the UK in 1971, I have co-authored 240 research publications, most of them in the surface science area, and also written several book chapters.

The bulk of my career has been at the national labs, starting at Daresbury Lab in England in 1971.  I spent 21 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in New York.

My research has involved understanding the fundamental physical behavior of materials and surfaces via photoemission studies of the electronic structure, and infrared studies of the vibrational dynamics of adsorbates.  This research has motivated a lifelong parallel development of ultra-bright light sources as probes, a path that took me to the Daresbury synchrotron (NINA), Tantalus, NSLS and to JLab's FEL. I built vuv/soft x-ray facilities at the NSLS and initiated infrared synchrotron radiation activities there.  Recently I have moved  into the THz regime using the ultrafast facilities that are part of the FEL facility.   I was the 1990 co-recipient of an R&D 100 award for developing a wavefront dividing interferometer for use with ultrabright sources.  Current research programs involve ultrafast pump-probe dynamics of novel materials and of bonding vibrational modes in both time and frequency domains. 

Here's a list of my publications.

Brief Resume:

2000 – present              Jefferson Lab

1979-2000                    Brookhaven National Laboratory

1977-1979                    Montana State University

1971-1979                    Leicester University (UK)

1971    PhD                  Sheffield University (UK)

1968    BSc                  Hull University (UK)

Lots of people ask me about the Binding Energies of the Elements, for which I welcome any updates by e-mail, see address above.  I put the data into a periodic table based on an idea of Cliff Olson, which is available as a 24"x36" poster pdf format.
When I am not doing physics I am often calling folk dances (called contradances), or even dancing.