Following the successful relaunch of the joint UK Seminar Series last week, Professor Swapan Chattopadhyay will be discussing the topic of quantum beams. The talk will be given at 16:15 on Thursday 21st October on Zoom. Further details and the Zoom link can be found on on the seminar series Indico page.

Typically charged particle beams in accelerators behave classically, with quantum effects, if any, being negligible. Radiation from a charged particle beam, however, can be analysed for its statistical properties in terms of 'incoherent' or 'coherent' states of light in classical, semi-classical and quantum regimes. The physics can become important in particle beam collisions at very high energies and high intensities (e.g. 'beamsstrahlung' limitations in electron-positron collisions), but more importantly at very low intensities of a few charged particles and photons (e.g. a single electron or a single photon). Understanding single photon/electron classical, semi-classical and quantum statistical dynamics can be useful in such processes as 'optical stochastic cooling' etc.

Professor Chattopaddhyay will give a general introduction to the subject and limited results from experiments to date. He will also touch upon quantum aspects of 'Atomic Beams' and 'Cavity Electrodynamics' in search of the 'dark' sector the vacuum.