PhD project “Coherent radiation of electrons interacting with intense laser pulses” (226)

The Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC (ELI ERIC) is the world’s largest and most advanced high-power laser research infrastructure. As an international user facility dedicated to multi-disciplinary science, ELI provides access to world-class high-power, high-repetition-rate laser systems and enables cutting-edge research, as well as breakthrough technological innovations. The ELI ERIC operates as a single multi-site organization with two complementary facilities specialized in different fields of research with extreme light: ELI Beamlines in Dolní Břežany (Czech Republic) and ELI ALPS in Szeged (Hungary).

ELI Beamlines Facility operates four cutting-edge high-power femtosecond laser systems reaching unprecedented intensities. The operational laser systems make unique femtosecond sources of X-rays and accelerated particles available to scientific users for pioneering research in physical, chemical, materials, life and medical sciences as well as physics of dense plasmas, warm dense matter, and laboratory astrophysics. The ELI Beamlines Facility employs over 350 researchers, engineers and other professionals from more than 38 countries.

The progress in laser technology in the last 35 years has provided a tremendous increase of laser power and intensity, which opens the opportunity to explore the light-matter interaction in strong field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED) regime. ELI Beamlines in the Czech Republic is one of the few facilities in the world, which within one year will start producing laser pulses on 10 PW level of power and up to 1023 W/cm2 intensity. Combining such a high-intensity fields with GeV-class electron beams, also available at ELI Beamlines makes this facility ideal to experimentally investigate SFQED processes, such as hard photon emission by charged particles (nonlinear Compton scattering, NCS) and electron-positron pair creation by photons (nonlinear Breit-Wheeler effect, NBW).

In our team we have the following position available: PhD project “Coherent radiation of electrons interacting with intense laser pulses” (226).

In the present project, we will extend SFQED to account for collective effects, when several particles coherently participate in a quantum process. This is a completely new regime, where both collective and QED effects dominate the dynamic of the system. In particular, the aim of the project is to study theoretically and numerically the coherency of radiation emitted by many ultrarelativistic particles interacting with a strong electromagnetic field. The key feature of the analysis is to work within the full quantum regime, where not only recoil effects in the emission are taken into account but also the collective quantum properties of the incoming multi-electron bunch.

The PhD student will be supervised by E. Gelfer (ELI Beamlines) and O. Klimo (ELI Beamlines, Czech Technical University in Prague). The project is funded by the NSF-GACR grant “Coherent radiation of electrons interacting with intense laser pulses” and will be implemented in close collaboration with A. Di Piazza (University of Rochester, Laboratory for Laser Energetics). The duration of the project is 3 years.

We offer:

• opportunity to work in this unique international scientific institution;
• competitive and motivating salary;
• flexible working hours;
• good working environment;
• career growth, professional education;
• meal allowance, pension contribution;
• 5 weeks of holidays and 6 days of personal leave;
• support of leisure time activities.

For more information, please contact Evgeny Gelfer evgeny.gelfer@eli-beams.eu. Applications, containing CV, cover letter, contacts of references, and any other material the candidate considers relevant, should be sent to Mrs. Jana Ženíšková, HR Senior Specialist (jana.zeniskova@eli-beams.eu, +420 601 560 322).

Information on the processing of personal data can be found on https://www.eli-beams.eu/informace-o-zpracovani-vasich-osobnich-udaju-gdpr/. We are an equal opportunity employer.