Avnish Kumar Sharma Honored With Young Scientist Award

Avnish Kumar Sharma

Avnish Kumar Sharma of the Laser Applications Group

Avnish Kumar Sharma, a research associate in the Laser Applications Group in the Instrumentation Division, was recently awarded the 2006 Young Scientist Award from the Government of India's Department of Atomic Energy. This prestigious award is given to a few young Indian scientists annually and comes with a citation, medal and 50,000 Indian rupees.

Sharma received the award for his contributions in building India's first chirped pulse amplification (CPA)-based tabletop terawatt neodymium (Nd):glass laser system and ultrashort laser pulse diagnostics, while working on his Ph.D. at the Laser Plasma Division of Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology in Indore, India. He was attracted to the field of ultrashort pulse lasers after completing his Masters of Technology in Optoelectronics and Optical Communication at the Indian Institute of Technology.

"Such lasers are valuable tools for various applications and research, particularly in the study of behavior of materials at extreme conditions," Sharma said.

Last January, Sharma came to Brookhaven to start a postdoctoral fellowship doing research on high-power lasers and their applications, under the supervision of Triveni Rao. According to Rao, Sharma has made great progress on the two projects that he is working on at Brookhaven. Some of the techniques from his previous research in India have helped him in this present work.

Currently, Sharma is designing an optical system to modify the laser beam profile and temporal pulse shape for a variety of applications. For instance, a flat-top beam profile and temporal shape are desirable in building low-emittance electron sources, and optical parametric amplifiers. The goal of this research is to eventually generate arbitrary pulses in parabolic, triangular or exponential shapes.

"We are designing and testing prototypes of passive laser beam profiles and temporal pulse shapers at Instrumentation's Laser Lab, for an ongoing energy recovery linear accelerator project in the Collider-Accelerator Department," Sharma said. The system may be used on other projects at BNL, such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) e-cooler.

Sharma is also developing a CPA-based high repetition rate (10 Hertz) multi-terawatt Titanium(Ti):Sapphire laser system to deliver an extremely intense pulse of one quintillion (1018) watts per centimeter squared in less than 50 femtoseconds, the time needed for light to travel through a strand of hair. This pulse is 20 times shorter than the Nd:glass laser system's pulse Sharma designed in India. The Ti:Sapphire laser system will be a very versatile source of radiation and particles, Sharma explained.

Sharma is excited to be working at Brookhaven. "Since I started my career in India, I was fascinated by the [US] national labs involved in building and managing gigantic size machines for various research," he said.

And so far, Sharma has thoroughly enjoyed his time at the Lab. "I have experienced a lot of hospitality at BNL, especially when we arrived here after traveling almost half of the globe and not knowing our way around," he said. "Everyone [here] helped us a lot. I found that the [BNL people] have great respect for human life and they care about human values and needs."

More information about Sharma and his research can be found online at: http://dravnishsharma.googlepages.com/home.

-- Kirsten Dorans

2008-737  |  INT/EXT  |  Newsroom