Robert & Lillis Kingman Lecture Series

Small Particle Accelerators for Big 21st Century Science

Michael Downer, distinguished university teaching professor of physics at the University of Texas, Austin, will speak on "Small Particle Accelerators for Big 21st Century Science" at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, in the Howard Performing Arts Center on the campus of Andrews University. The lecture is free and open to the public. Cocurricular credit and chapel credit will be available for students.

The cost of a high-end particle accelerator designed to discover the secrets of the universe exceeds the annual budgets of some countries, and its size exceeds the land area of some of them. A country as big and rich as the U.S. can only afford about a dozen mid-range proton accelerators to zap tumors deep in the human brain, even though proton therapy ranks among the most effective deep cancer treatments with the fewest side effects. An X-ray laser driven by the SLAC electron accelerator in California has made several Nobel-prize-winning discoveries in molecular biology, medicine and materials science within the past decade. Yet the U.S. can only afford one of them, despite cries for more from the international scientific community. Why do machines for accelerating nature's tiniest particles have to be so big and so expensive?

Downer's research team is pioneering a new generation of electron accelerators, driven by powerful femtosecond lasers, that are thousands of times smaller and cheaper than conventional accelerators and have applications in areas ranging from materials science to medicine. In the plenary presentation, he will explain the basic atomic physics that has driven today's high-energy particle accelerators. He will also describe how a growing international community of physicists is using a material called "plasma," containing not a single intact atom, to accelerate electrons and protons to energies sufficient for X-ray lasers and proton therapy on tabletops inside university laboratories.   

Michael Downer is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America), winner of a 2016 Humboldt Research Prize "in recognition of career-long accomplishments in research and teaching," and a university distinguished teaching professor. He enjoys training students by challenging them to design and build experiments that fit on a tabletop, that they can get their arms and head around and call their own. He has supervised over 60 doctoral, masters and undergraduate research dissertations since joining the University of Texas physics department in 1985. When not teaching or supervising experiments, he enjoys teaching and leading the Hill Country Highland Dancers, an Austin-based Scottish Highland dance group.