Brookhaven Lecture

Imagine if, by staying in your lane when driving on the expressway, you could help fight cancer or provide a new, clean energy source. You would clench the steering wheel with both hands and stay in your lane, right? Unlike driving on the expressway where you intentionally avoid hitting other cars, scientists sometimes work to steer particle beams into head-on collisions with other oncoming particle beams. However, the particles must be kept "in their lanes" for cleaner, more frequent collisions. Some scientists propose starting the whole process by using lasers to heat a fixed target as a way to get particles with higher charge, which are more steerable. These scientists believe the new methods could be used to develop particle beams for killing cancer cells or creating usable energy from fusion. Join Masahiro Okamura of Brookhaven's Collider-Accelerator Department for the 447th Brookhaven Lecture, titled "The Next Generation of Heavy Ion Sources." Okamura will explain how lasers can be used to create plasma, neutral mixtures of positive ions and negative electrons, from different materials, and how using this plasma leads to beams with higher charge states and currents. He will also discuss how this efficient, simpler method of producing particle beams might be used for cancer therapy, to develop new energy sources, or in synchrotrons. Okamura attended the Tokyo Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor of science in applied physics in 1990 and then a masters' degree and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering in 1992 and 1995 respectively. In 1995, he joined RIKEN's Radiation Laboratory as a contracted researcher and then became an Invited Scientist that same year. He worked as a special postdoctoral researcher at RIKEN from late 1995 until 1998, a contracted researcher until 1999, and a researcher from 1999 until 2006. He joined Brookhaven as a physi