Jefferson Lab Colloquia: Sergei Nagaitsev

Title: Maxwell’s Demon Goes Optical

Speaker: Sergei Nagaitsev

Abstract: Transition and synchrotron radiation, emitted by relativistic particles, carries information about the granular structure of the beam. With modern instrumentation and techniques, we are now learning how to use this information to study and, also, to manipulate particle beams at optical wavelength scales. In this talk, we will describe a series of experiments, carried out in the Fermilab IOTA storage ring with single- and many-electrons as well as several combinations of undulators and optical devices. The experiments were designed to shed some “light” onto the fundamental and applied questions of these radiation techniques. We will describe several practical applications: the first ever demonstration of a novel beam cooling method, Optical Stochastic Cooling, and how it is related to EIC Strong Hadron Cooling. We will also discuss the future directions of these experiments.

Biography: Sergei Nagaitsev is the EIC Principal Accelerator Scientist at Jefferson Lab and Professor at Old Dominion University, Physics Department. He received his undergraduate degree in 1989 from Novosibirsk University and completed his Ph.D. in accelerator physics at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1995. He joined Fermilab in 1995 and led the effort to design, install and commission the world’s first relativistic electron cooling system of antiprotons in 2005. In 2006, he was elected APS Fellow (Division of Physics of Beams). In 2007, he received the USPAS Prize for Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology. In 2015, he received the Dieter Möhl Medal (2015), sponsored by CERN. He is past-chair of the APS DPB and a member of the Snowmass 2021 steering committee. He serves on several advisory panels, including CERN MAC, IRFU Scientific Council and FAIR MAC.