AAC08 Day 4

OK, I'm starting to feel a bit sleep-deprived, but that's OK. We will soldier on...

The plenary session this morning started off with Phillippe Piot of Fermilab/Northern Illinois University, talking about Control and manipulation of electron beams. He covered three different aspects of this:

- maximizing beam brightness
- repartitioning of phase space between different degrees of freedom to tailor the 2D brightness for specific application, eg. FEL, mu-colliers;
- tailoring the beam's distribution along one direction.mainly along the longitudinal coordinate.

He talked about the planned emittance exchange experiment that was being planned.

This was then followed by a talk on Optical Accelerator Structures by B. Cowan (Tech-X). This is where, instead of RF structures with larger wavelengths, we are now exciting these accelerating structures using optical EM wave. This implies that with the shorter wavelength, these optical structures are tiny! He talked about various types of structures, the physics involved, and of course, the major challenges in engineering and fabricating such structures. I'm very impressed at how these things are constructed, even if they are using various advances from the electronics industries.

The last talk in the session was on Computation on new architectures by B. Albright of Los Alamos. He had a longer title than this, but I didn't write it down. This is basically a talk on advanced computing hardware. In particular, he was describing the porting of VPIC codes onto the RoadRunner supercomputer built by IBM that is now being delivered to Los Alamos.

As I listened to this presentation, the one thing that came across my mind repeatedly was "big toys for big boys". :) This thing is going to be impressive! But then again, the "big toys for big boys" can be said to almost everything being presented in this workshop.

Our banquet is tonight at the Monterey Aquarium. This should be utterly fun!

Zz.