Science with X-ray Pulses – New frontiers in exploring the science of matter at microscopic scale

Jon Marangos has been the Lockyer Professor of Physics at Imperial College London since 2002. He is Director of the Blackett Laboratory Laser Consortium at Imperial College which is a research group investigating the science of extreme light: attoseconds, high fields, high intensity X-rays. From 2008-2010 he led the UK STFC New Light Source Project that developed a conceptual design for a high repetition rate X-ray FEL and since then he has been active in FEL science using facilities in the USA, Germany and Japan. From 1995-2000 he was an EPSRC Advanced Fellow that enabled him to develop research collaborations at NIST, Gaithersburg, where he was a Guest Researcher in 1991, and at KEK, Japan, where he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo applying lasers to muon science. He remains active in developing the next generation of methods for measuring ultrafast structural dynamics in matter with special current interest in polymer optoelectronics, gas and liquid phase photochemistry, attosecond processes in molecules and at surfaces.

The talk will introduce the new sources of ultrafast X-rays: X-ray free electron lasers and high harmonic generation from intense optical lasers. These can both generate X-ray pulses as short as 10-15 second (1 thousandths of a millionth of a millionth of a second) and so enable us to study the very fastest events in nature that involve the rearrangement of electrons in matter.