Colorado State University Professors Featured at Ultra-fast Science Workshop

Two Colorado State University electrical engineering faculty members – Sandra Biedron and Stephen Milton – will present their work this week at an international workshop at Argonne National Laboratory, a DOE National Laboratory, to address challenges and opportunities associated with creating and using THz sources in conjunction with x-rays.

Terahertz waves are at the low energy of the electromagnetic spectrum, close to microwaves and radio waves. Each molecule has a unique “signature” when struck by Terahertz waves.

Biedron and Milton will give a talk “Compact, e-beam based mm-and THz-wave light sources,” focused on the ability to create high-power THz pulses using a process that bunches an electron beam and forces it to radiate coherently. They will summarize designs and experiments of sources that have worked on, including their own invention, with an international team from CSU, ENEA-Frascati (Italy), Argonne, the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Twente (the Netherlands).

“We are enthusiastic that this workshop will result in stronger cooperation between the source developers and the end-users of THz pulses,” said Biedron, who was a participant, contributor, and author to a major 2004 report on Terahertz science sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

The 2004 workshop DOE-NIH-NSF workshop report can be found at http://science.energy.gov/~/media/bes/pdf/reports/files/thz_rpt.pdf.
The details on the Argonne workshop can be found at
http://www.aps.anl.gov/Accelerator_Systems_Division/THz_workshop/

Before joining CSU, Biedron most recently served as the DOD Project Office director and as associate director of the Accelerator Institute at Argonne. In January, she was named a 2012 Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Milton was a key member of the delivery team of the two brightest x-ray sources in North America. At Argonne most recently, he was Argonne Project Office director for the Argonne components for the Linac Coherent Light Source now operational at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. Most recently he served as the director of the FERMI@Elettra free-electron laser project in Italy.

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