(Current PhD Student)
Although the case for building new and more powerful hadron accelerators doesn't look good, accelerator physics is flourishing with other types of machines.
Particularly interesting to me is ultrafast electron diffraction (UED)[1,2]. UED is cool because you can create atomic resolution movies with speeds that can (in the near future) resolve chemical reactions as they occur. (eg. imagine being able to see a protein change conformations in a biological reaction)
This application is limited by the number of electrons we can stick in a given volume and get traveling in the same direction. The only way to improve this is by increasing the electric field in your electron gun or by choosing good materials for your photocathode. [3]
My research is on the second route and I'm currently building a measurement system that will allow us to test several theories related to how we choose these materials. Improvement in this domain is important and could open up a huge amount of research, but unfortunately doesn't get the kind of publicity that the big projects do.
[1] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/instruments/mev-ued
[2] Dwyer, J. R., Hebeisen, C. T., Ernstorfer, R., Harb, M., Deyirmenjian, V. B., Jordan, R. E., & Dwayne Miller, R. J. (2006). Femtosecond electron diffraction:‘making the molecular movie’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 364(1840), 741-778.
[3] Rao, T., & Dowell, D. H. (2014). An engineering guide to photoinjectors. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.7539.
Although the case for building new and more powerful hadron accelerators doesn't look good, accelerator physics is flourishing with other types of machines.
Particularly interesting to me is ultrafast electron diffraction (UED)[1,2]. UED is cool because you can create atomic resolution movies with speeds that can (in the near future) resolve chemical reactions as they occur. (eg. imagine being able to see a protein change conformations in a biological reaction)
This application is limited by the number of electrons we can stick in a given volume and get traveling in the same direction. The only way to improve this is by increasing the electric field in your electron gun or by choosing good materials for your photocathode. [3]
My research is on the second route and I'm currently building a measurement system that will allow us to test several theories related to how we choose these materials. Improvement in this domain is important and could open up a huge amount of research, but unfortunately doesn't get the kind of publicity that the big projects do.
[1] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/instruments/mev-ued
[2] Dwyer, J. R., Hebeisen, C. T., Ernstorfer, R., Harb, M., Deyirmenjian, V. B., Jordan, R. E., & Dwayne Miller, R. J. (2006). Femtosecond electron diffraction:‘making the molecular movie’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 364(1840), 741-778.
[3] Rao, T., & Dowell, D. H. (2014). An engineering guide to photoinjectors. arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.7539.