James Benjamin Rosenzweig

James Benjamin Rosenzweig is an experimental plasma physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In the field of plasma wakefield acceleration, he is regarded as the father of the non-linear "blowout" interaction regime, where a laser beam, when fired into a plasma at intense levels, expels electrons from the plasma and creates a spherical structure that can effectively focus and accelerate the plasma. He is the recipient of the 2007 Free Electron Laser (FEL) Prize, 2022 Advanced Accelerator Prize,

Early life and career Rosenzweig received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1988.

From 2009 to 2014, Rosenzweig served as the chair of the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy. He is the director of the UCLA's Particle Beam Physics Laboratory, which primarily focuses on exploring the fundamental aspects of high brightness, ultra-fast relativistic electron beams.

Rosenzweig co-founded several industrial accelerator companies, including RadiaBeam Technologies in 2003.

Scientific contributions Rosenzweig's research specializes in advanced accelerator, beam, and radiation techniques, along with their applications across various scientific disciplines. His research has applications in very high field accelerators based on lasers, wakefields, plasmas and dielectrics, as well as the production of radiation in free-electron lasers and Compton scattering sources, with applications ranging from high field pumps for studying non-equilibrium high field phenomena to atomic-molecular level ultra-fast imaging techniques.

Rosenzweig has written a textbook, Fundamentals of Beam Physics, which emphasizes unity of concepts between charged particles and laser beams.

Honors and awards Rosenzweig was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 1993. He is a recipient of the SCC and Wilson Fellowships. He was awarded the 2022 Advanced Accelerator Prize

In 2023, Rosenzweig, along with Pisin Chen and Chandrashekhar J. Joshi, jointly received the Hannes Alfvén Prize from the European Physical Society. They were honored for inventing and pioneering the technique of beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA).

Publications Books