First director appointed for Stanford's new Ultrafast Science Center

By Heather Rock Woods

Phil Bucksbaum has joined the Stanford faculty to direct the new Ultrafast Science Center, which is a partnership between Stanford and the U.S. Department of Energy. Bucksbaum will be a professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and in Stanford's Applied Physics Department. SLAC Deputy Director Keith Hodgson announced his appointment on Oct. 17.

"I'm very excited to be doing this," Bucksbaum said. "The scientists our center will attract will together develop pioneering experiments and exceptional machine capabilities that will advance our understanding in myriad fields and bring wonderful benefits to society."

Bucksbaum is an atomic physicist and, until now, director of the National Science Foundation's Center for the Advancement of Frontiers in Optical Coherent Ultrafast Science (FOCUS) at the University of Michigan, where he remains the Peter Franken Distinguished University Professor of Physics and the Otto Laporte Professor of Physics this academic year. He will work part-time at the Stanford center and part-time in Michigan during this transition year.

After graduating from Harvard, Bucksbaum earned his doctoral degree from the University of California-Berkeley. He did postdoctoral work and became a principal investigator at AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining the Michigan faculty in 1990. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Phil is a world-class expert in atomic-molecular-optical physics," Hodgson said. "He's done a spectacular job of leading the development of the Michigan research center, and his leadership skills will be fantastic for us."

Researchers in the growing new field of ultrafast science scrutinize very tiny things that move and change at super-fast speeds. The Stanford center is bringing together scientists with distinct expertise to develop experiments for and push the performance of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS)a machine currently being built that combines X-ray and laser properties. By acting like a lightning-quick strobe light, this machine will essentially make X-ray motion pictures of phenomena no other instrumentor eyecan see.

LCLS, the world's first "hard" X-ray free electron laser, will begin operating at SLAC in 2009. To capture the phenomenally small and fast in action, LCLS will create extremely brilliant X-ray pulses that last mere quadrillionths of a second.

Experiments using the LCLS will offer new ways of studying and constructing nanotechnology devices, predicted to become a backbone of future industry and technology. They will capture the structural rearrangements of atoms in reactions like photosynthesis and catalysis, create and probe extreme states of matter called plasmas, which are found in the cores of giant planets and proto-stars, and explore how proteins function as the engines of life, which is highly relevant to health and disease.

The Department of Energy's Office of Science funds SLAC and the Ultrafast Science Center, which received its first funding$4.7 million for three yearsthis fiscal year. In addition, in January the W. M. Keck Foundation awarded Stanford $1 million for developing research programs in the center focused in the area of ultrafast chemistry.

"The Ultrafast Science Center is the perfect tool to develop the unprecedented opportunities in ultrafast science, and Phil Bucksbaum is the ideal scientist to lead this initiative," said SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan. "The new center is part of the strong foundation for photon science at SLAC and on the rest of the Stanford campus."