Extreme Laboratory Astrophysics and high photon energy source development.

With the advent of high power laser facilities such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), the focussed laser intensity is becoming large enough to be able to excite astrophysical processes that are relevant to the early Universe. These include magnetized supersonic turbulence, generation of (pseudo)scalar fields, and high energy x-ray and gamma-ray sources. In this project, the student will be involved in developing the underlying theory and designing experiments that can access these regimes. The core of the experimental work will focus on high energy electron beam colliding with optical laser pulses in order to produce both gamma-ray pulses (by inverse Compton scattering) and (pseudo)scalar particles. The application of this work is both towards the understanding of extreme astrophysical processes as well as for the generation of intense x-ray and gamma-ray pulses. The latter will be important for material studies in inertial fusion energy and is of direct interest to AWE.