colloquium announcement

The Berkeley Laboratory has been developing approaches to provide a multi-user radiation source suitable to study ultra-fast dynamical processes. Our strategy has been to establish a strong femto-science program at LBNL based on Laser Manipulation of Beams. After assessing the practicality of possible approaches to a large scale facility, we have focused on two diverse techniques: 1) a synchrotron radiation x-ray source based on a recirculating superconducting linac that feeds an array of undulators and bend magnets. Incoherent optical pulses << 100 fs are obtained by a combination of electron pulse compression, transverse temporal correlation of the electrons, and x-ray pulse compression. Such an accelerator would also support several fully coherent soft X-ray FEL beamlines at wavelengths down to 1 nm and pulses as short as 0.5 fs. The FELs are based on a master-oscillator-power amplifier configuration in which the oscillator is temporally locked to the electron bunches. 2) The second approach utilizes TW lasers to produce an all optical Thompson scattering source or a FEL operating in the Self-Amplified Superadiant Emission mode.