Tsumoru Shintake Awarded German Physics Prize

This year’s Gersch Budker Prize goes to Professor Tsumoru Shintake of OIST for his work on the SACLA X-Ray Free Electron Laser.

AsianScientist (Apr. 8, 2014) – The European Physical Society (EPS) has awarded this year’s Gersch Budker Prize to Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Professor Tsumoru Shintake for leading the design, construction, commissioning and operation of the SACLA X-Ray Free Electron Laser. Shintake, who now heads the OIST Quantum Wave Microscopy Unit, previously worked at the SACLA facility at RIKEN, where he was the main accelerator construction leader.

The Gersch Budker Prize is awarded annually by the EPS Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) to a scientist with “a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field.” The EPS-AG Committee cited Shintake’s leadership in “the construction of the SACLA X-Ray FEL based on novel C-band technology in the RIKEN SPring-8 Center.” The 400 m long SACLA linear accelerator, with accelerating gradients of 35 MV/m, provides 8 GeV beams with extreme energy stability better than 0.014%.

The committee said, “Shintake contributed to all aspects of the project including the electron source, the C-band linac and the undulator alignment. His visionary choice of a thermionic gun, with CeB6 single crystal as cathode material, has proven to be successful in terms of emittance and stability.

“The first lasing of the FEL in June 2011 was the crowning achievement of numerous technological developments, and was also made possible by the successful industrialization of the C-band technology, developed from scratch.”

The C-band high gradient accelerator is now running stably to drive beams of low emittance electrons created by a thermionic electron source, making it possible to generate stable X-ray radiation. Research at SACLA is expected to resolve questions in science, technology and industry, by helping to understand structure and function at the atomic level.

Shintake’s vision to build devices from scratch is currently being accomplished at OIST. His unit is building a microscope that uses the quantum wave effect of electron beams to study biological samples without damaging their atomic structure.

The EPS-AG Committee concluded, “Last but not least, Shintake’s numerous highly innovative ideas strongly influenced the progress and development of many areas of accelerator physics and technology over the past decades, including a beam size monitor for nanometer sized beams now called the ‘Shintake Monitor’. ”

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Source: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

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