Description
Laser is possibly the most important invention of the 20th century with applications spanning across all human activities from medicine, telecommunications, information technology or entertainment to manufacturing, defense, energy production or fundamental science research in astrophysics or cosmology.
This talk will give you a brief overview of how lasers work, their applications and future developments. It will also provide a tour of the world’s biggest laser facilities and the new laser center ELI Beamlines currently constructed on the outskirts of Prague that will soon harbor the most powerful laser beam in the world. A brief outline of the most recent research in particle acceleration and ultra-fast x-ray and particle diagnostics by Katerina Falk will also be given.
Kateřina works as a scientist specializing in plasma physics with a special focus dense plasmas relevant to fusion technology and laboratory astrophysics. She earned her degrees at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, before moving to New Mexico, USA, where she joined a research group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She has worked on the biggest laser systems on the planet before joining the scientific team at ELI Beamlines, Czech Academy of Sciences.