Active Projects - FY 2020
New LDRD Projects
Lead Scientist: Angelo Dragone
The goal of this project is to design, fabricate, and characterize a prototype of a small area X-ray camera with spectroscopic performance capable of full frame operation at 1 megahertz by adopting an architecture with an extremely high level of parallel processing capabilities reading signals from the sensor pixels. This is a critical building block whose successful implementation will provide the basis and a risk mitigation for development of large area cameras capable of matching the full rate of the LCLS-II. One of the ultimate goals of this project is the unique scientific opportunity to capture of “rare events”.
Lead Scientist: Shawn Henderson
The project seeks to improve the detector-readout system known as microwave multiplexing, a rising technology in cosmic microwave background cosmology and x-ray astrophysics, by modifying the design of the microwave multiplexing cryogenic circuit and to bring its fabrication to SLAC and Stanford. This effort differs from more conservative existing efforts focused on legacy microwave multiplexing designs. The major improvement would be the reduction of the physical size of the superconducting resonators, which would enable a larger number of resonators to be located in the same physical area. Increased resonator density reduces thermal mass, system complexity, and cost per readout component.
Lead Scientist: Jake Koralek
This project explores the physics and chemistry of nanoscale liquid heterostructures, utilizing ultrafast optics, infrared microscopy, ultrafast X-rays and electrons. Liquid sheets of only ~100 molecules across allow the transmission of infrared, ultraviolet/X-rays, and even electrons, enabling spectroscopies that were not previously possible on liquids. The ultrathin sheets are optically flat over a wide area, making them ideal targets for a wide range of free electron laser, synchrotron, and ultrafast electron diffraction experiments, and they are expected to be widely used at the new LCLS-II and LCLS-II-HE instruments.
Lead Scientist: Mengning Liang
Dynamic polymer networks, a new class of polymers in which covalent bonds are replaced by reversible dynamics bonds with lower bonding energy, have remarkable properties such as self-healing and super-elasticity as well as implications for sustainability. This project aims to apply coherent X-ray scattering techniques to this unique new class of polymer materials. If successful, this effort will generate preliminary work that demonstrates the ability to use the unique characteristics of free electron lasers to aid in understanding the dynamics of a new generation of polymers.
Lead Scientist: Nicholas Melosh
Optical color centers in wide band-gap materials such as diamond and silicon carbide are exciting systems for quantum information science but have major challenges to implement due to lack of controlled placement and difficulty making at the nanoscale. This project will build a new program based around color center generation and imaging through materials-design, allowing straight-forward nanometer-scale location control as well as incorporation into nanoscale particles. SLAC’s unique capabilities, particularly the new cryo-electron microscopy facility, will be harnessed to grow a unique, internationally recognized effort for color-center based quantum information science.
Lead Scientist: Emilio Nanni
This project will investigate a new class of millimeter-wave devices that enable quantum transduction in the millimeter-wave regime. The project will utilize the millimeter-wave regime as an intermediate state in a two-step transduction scheme. A “quantum bus” would perform the microwave to millimeter-wave transduction with a superconducting resonator at milli-Kelvin temperatures before transporting the photon and its quantum information to higher temperatures. Making the first demonstration of a coherent quantum transduction between microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies is the goal. Developing these transducers will have a dramatic impact on the ability to control quantum systems and develop quantum networks
