(Los Angeles, CA 23MAR05) RadiaBeam Technologies, LLC has entered into discussions with UCLA to license Professor Bahram Jalali's innovative time stretching technology that has already demonstrated a record-breaking 1 TS/s digitization rate. RadiaBeam foresees a wide market for this ultra high speed transient digitizer.
Transient and high speed signals are produced in a wide range of basic research experiments and require ever faster methods of analysis and digitization. For high energy physics colliders, the creation and control of nanoscale beams requires detailed knowledge of the beam properties and positions. Diagnostics such as beam position monitors and current pick loops tell physicists where the beams are located and what is the charge distribution. These diagnostics produce fast electrical signals that require sophisticated signal processing to analyze. Jalali's high speed digitizer -- "The Terasampler" as RadiaBeam Technologies has branded it -- would allow for direct measurement of these signals, and would work along side or in place of traditional tools such as streak cameras and microwave circuits.
The Terasampler imprints the electrical signal to be measured onto a optical signal. The optical signal is then stretched in time using fiber optics. Finally, the lengthened optical signal is converted back into a much slower but otherwise identical copy of the electrical signal. A standard oscilloscope of digitizer can then read the stretched electrical signal.
Initial applications for the Terasampler include combustion studies, radar, and the study of and protections against EMP attacks, and in basic research. As physicists push the energy frontier to search for new particles and test new theories, the colliders they use are driven to produce ever smaller and more intense beam, and the role of beam diagnostics and the attendant signal analyzers becomes central. UCLA's invention will allow for these diagnostics to continue improving the collider operations and hence enable new physics to be discovered.
In addition to diagnostics, colliders require ultra fast feedback systems including the critical "stochastic cooling" systems, which are based on Schottky noise. Determining if these feedback systems are working properly, requires careful observation of transient events. The Terasampler would prove a critical tool for these feedback mechanisms. The existence of the time-domain Terasampler would allow diagnosis of the bunched beam cooling systems in this range and beyond, thereby giving a key tool for deploying such systems.
Accelerator based light sources -- brilliant sources of x-rays and light -- are used by thousands of researchers at a time to probe materials. Virtually everything we know about protein structure comes from crystallography performed at these light sources. New medicines, new tests for cancer, and even knowledge about ancient and modern sources of pollution have all come from these light sources.
Operation of these facilities requires precision control and ultra high reliability. Understanding the dynamics of the beam, its susceptibility to instabilities, and controlling the beam's position are all crucial to success. The high speed digitizer would allow for a new degree of control.
At the other end of the light source, the scientists who use the brilliant light, need to measure the effects on the material under study. A "pump and probe" technique is often used whereby a material is "excited" by a pump beam and then probed with a different source (usually a laser). A new means of measuring the effect on materials could open the way to new discoveries. While some of these effects occur on the femtosecond time scale, and are far to fast to measure electrically, others last hundreds of picoseconds and are ideally suited to the Terasampler.
Many topics from nuclear weapons to automobiles rely on an understanding of how materials respond to shock compression. High power lasers are often used to create a shock wave in a material, and then high speed methods are used to study the response of the material. Again, the Terasampler would allow a more detailed understanding of these experiments which are critical to, for example, stockpile stewardship.
Additional information on RadiaBeam is available at the company web site: http://www.radiabeam.com/
About RadiaBeam Technologies, LLC
RadiaBeam Technologies manufactures products, performs directed research, and provides custom design and engineering services in the beam and accelerator research sector.
Our products come from technology transfer, licensing and original designs. We focus on novel acceleration methods, diagnostics, subsystems and EM radiation production.
The company has three main regimes of specialization: high brightness beams, femtosecond systems, and novel industrial / medical accelerators.
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