This award from the IMR_MIP program and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activity in to Florida State University supports a conceptual engineering design (CED) of a Free Electron Laser Light Source for High Magnetic Field Research. This project brings together the expertise of three world-leading US institutions; the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, home to the world's highest steady magnetic field, the Jefferson Laboratory, site of the most powerful free-electron laser, and the renowned University of California at Santa Barbara Center for Terahertz Science and Technology. In the first phase, experts from these laboratories will design a versatile and powerful free-electron laser facility plus the infrastructure to couple it to the Tallahassee high-field magnets. The free-electron laser system will provide unprecedented coverage of the electromagnetic spectrum in a single facility, producing radiation ranging from millimeter wavelengths to the near infrared. In spite of this great versatility, the new laser system will be based on tried and tested US technology, with reliability a key design factor.
This high-magnetic-field plus free-electron-laser facility is being developed in response to emerging needs and desires of the scientific community, identified at a series of workshops and conferences in the past two years. It will be dedicated to new types of experiment in physics, chemistry and biophysics that utilize a magnetic field's ability to manipulate the electrons within matter, plus the free-electron laser's ability to probe the resulting changes as a function of time, laser power and wavelength. Such techniques promise to provide important information about materials ranging from semiconductors to DNA, and from superconductors to nanoparticles, and processes from quantum computation to photosynthesis. The provision of this unique facility will help to maintain the US's competitiveness in fundamental science and its spin-off emergent technologies. Students, and postdocs from a diverse demographic and institutional backgrounds will be participate in this CED project.
