Colloquium Announcement

Intense ultrashort pulse lasers generate relativistic electrons when the intensity reaches relativistic scales, 1018 Wcm-2 for 800nm pulses. This requires Terra watt class lasers that are complex, cumbersome, expensive and deliver typically  10 pulses per second.  While the electron/x-rays/proton beams generated from such system have shown a lot of promise, developing applications on such systems is very challenging. I will talk about experiments where even at a 1/100th of laser intensity, it is feasible to generate relativistic electron beam of 1 MeV energy with multi kHz few mJ/pulse lasers. We show that plasma wave instabilities generated and manipulated with suitable targetry is the underlying mechanism. The source size of the short pulse electron beam is amenable for x-ray radiography and shadowgraphy.

Prof. M.Krishnamurthy is the center director at TIFR. He is an experimental physicist in the field of atomic, molecular and optical sciences who has carried out basic research on various aspects of laser-matter interactions. He is a fellow of INSA and Indian academy of sciences. He was a swarnajayanthi fellow and was also  granted distinguised outstanding investigator fellowship of DAE.