Professor Simon Hooker

I study the interaction of very high intensity laser pulses with plasma and applications which arise from these, such as very compact particle accelerators.

At intensities of around 1022 W m-2, laser pulses propagating through a plasma drive a longitudinal plasma wave which trails the laser pulse in much the same way a wake follows a boat travelling across water. The electric fields in the plasma wave can reach 100 kilovolts per micron, at least a thousand times bigger than the accelerating fields used in the LHC at CERN. Experiments performed by my group and a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were the first to demonstrate laser-driven acceleration of electrons to an energy of 1 GeV. This beam energy is typical of that used in `stadium-scale' synchrotrons and free-electron lasers, but our plasma acceleration stage was only 30mm long! My research group and I are presently working on novel ways of driving the plasma wave, new kinds of waveguide capable of channelling very intense laser pulses over long distances, techniques to control the injection of particles into the plasma wave, and the application of laser-accelerated electron beams to generate ultrafast X-ray pulses.

I am a Fellow of the UK’s Institute of Physics (IOP) and of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America), and a recipient of the American Physical Society's John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research and  the IOP's Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Medal and Prize.

At Merton I have given undergraduate tutorials on: Mechanics and Special Relativity; Atomic, Molecular, and Laser Physics; and Electromagnetism and Optics. Within the Department I currently give lectures on Laser Physics and Optics.