"Progress and Prospects of Plasma-based Accelerators and their Applications"

Chandrashekhar Joshi, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

2017 IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Awardee

Prof : Chandrashekhar Joshi

Bio: Chandrashekhar Joshi is considered the father of the experimental field of Plasma Accelerators. Major facilities have been built at SLAC and LBNL and many others are in the planning stage or being built overseas to develop Plasma Accelerators further. Professor's Joshi's Plasma Accelerator Group at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is world renowned for developing the multidisciplinary field of laser and electron beam-driven plasma accelerators over the past three decades. From fundamental research, Plasma Accelerators has now evolved into an engineering subfield. Joshi's UCLA group was the first to conclusively demonstrate the acceleration of electrons thousands of time more rapidly using relativistically propagating plasma waves than using conventional accelerators. Initially such plasma waves were excited using laser beams. This was followed by a series of elegant beam-driven plasma particle acceleration experiments using high-energy electron and positron beams at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. These experiments showed energy doubling of 42 billion volt electrons from the 3 km long SLAC linear accelerator in less than a meter of plasma accelerator. Joshi and his coworkers have been the first to reach nearly every major technical milestone in the field of  plasma accelerators. Professor Joshi is the 2017 IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Awardee in recognition for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear and plasma sciences and engineering.