Dr. Patric Muggli

 

Dr. Patric Muggli received his bachelor degree in Physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Ecole Polytechnique FÈdÈrale), Lausanne in 1985 with a specialty in plasma physics. He received his Ph.D. from the Physics Department from the Center of Plasma Physics Research of the same school for his work on high power gyrotrons. He then spent three year as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) department of electrical engineering where he worked on a number of different topics, including plasma-based radiation sources such as the frequency upshifting of radiation using relativistic ionization fronts and DC to AC Radiation (DARC) sources, and the photoemission processes form various elements such as copper, magnesium, diamond and fullerene. He then joined the electrical engineering/electrophysics department of the University of Southern California (USC) as Research Associate. He worked on the pioneering laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) experiments using the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) Vulcan laser, the world most powerful short pulse laser at the time. He was appointed as Research Associate Professor at USC in 2000, and Research Professor in 2006. He became one of the lead experimentalists on the SLAC/UCLA/USC collaboration that performs the plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. This experiment has been very successful in producing very interesting physics results, as well as advancing the PWFA from the level of basic physics experiments to that of a promising technology to significantly reduce the size of a future electron/positron linear collider. Some of the most significant results obtained in these experiments include: the discovery of the refraction of electron beams at a plasma/vacuum interface (P. Muggli et al., Nature 411, 43-43 (03 May 2001)), the first demonstration of the acceleration of positrons in plasmas (B.E. Blue et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 214801 (2003)), the first demonstration of an energy gain larger than one GeV in a plasma (M. J. Hogan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 054802 (2005)), and recently the demonstration of the energy doubling of 42 GeV incoming electrons in only 85 cm of plasma (I. Blumenfeld et al., Nature 445, 741-744 (15 February 2007)). He is also leading PWFA experiments at the Brookhaven National laboratory, where low energy beam are used to demonstrate new concepts in PWFAs. Dr. Muggli is the author or co-author of more that 40 scientific publications in refereed journals, and of numerous conference proceedings papers. These publications are available at http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~muggli/index.html. He has given more that 20 invited presentations at international meetings. He teaches a graduate plasma physics course at USC. His research interests include plasma-based radiation sources, plasma-based plasma accelerators, particle beam physics, and ultra-fast diagnostics of particle beams.