Principal Investigator: Patrick G. O'Shea
Co-Principal Investigators: Thomas M. Antonsen, Brian Beaudoin
Senior Personnel: Irving Haber, David Sutter, Santiago Bernal, Henry Freund

The Bright Beams Collective Research Group (BBC) is a world-class research facility in beam and accelerator physics at the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics on the University of Maryland, College Park campus. Using a scaled low-energy electron beam, BBC cleverly accesses the intense, high-brightness, regime of beam operation in accelerators at a much lower cost than larger and more energetic machines. BBC, therefore, makes an ideal testbed for experimenting in pushing up the brightness of existing and future accelerators.

The BBC Group's research is centered on exploring the physics of charged particle beams at the extreme frontier of intensity.  For many applications the intensity or luminosity frontier is as important as the energy frontier.  Examples of such applications include high-luminosity colliders, spallation neutron sources, and X-ray-free electron lasers and related intense light sources, high-average-power-free electron lasers, and future heavy ion-driven inertial fusion concepts. 

Research Areas of Interest

• Experimental beam physics
• Nonlinear accelerator optics
• Ring physics
• Space charge in beams
• Advanced beam diagnostics
• Beam halo
• Computation
• Nonlinear dynamics

BBC is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research, and the Joint Technology.

BBC Publications

Patrick G. O'Shea Professor (301)405-5020 | poshea@umd.edu Profile