Ursula Keller

Physics Department, ETH Zurich and Director, National Center of Competence in Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology (NCCR MUST)

Theme：”Recent advances in SESAM-modelocked high-power thin disk lasers”

9：20 – 9：55

High-power lasers delivering multi-100-W average power have led to revolutions in areas such as high-speed micromachining and high-repetition-rate sources for attosecond science. Amongst the competing technologies for high power ultrafast sources, thin disk oscillators stand out as offering excellent beam quality and noise properties, multi-MHz repetition rates, and high power directly from a relatively compact laser oscillator cavity. Thus, bypassing the complexity of ultrafast amplifiers. However, until now this potential advantage has been offset by a significant issue: the best performance at the output of a thin-disk oscillator were only possible operating the laser in a vacuum environment. This is due to the high intracavity peak power in these oscillators, which causes a large amount of self-phase-modulation (SPM) picked up in the intracavity air. We will review the current status of this laser technology and the future outlook.

Ruxin Li

Director, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Theme：”The 10PW and 100PW lasers: paving the way for exploring the next frontier of high field physics”

9：55 – 10：30

The development of ultra-high-peak-power ultrafast laser facilities worldwide has entered a new stage. There are several projects in either the preparatory phase or the implementation phase for delivering 10PW and even 100-200PW laser pulses. I will review this unprecedented advancement of high intensity ultrafast lasers and update the progress of 10PW Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF) which will be ready in the beginning of 2019 and then opened to users. The project of Station of Extreme Light (SEL) under the Shanghai Coherent Light Facility (SHINE) will be introduced. SHINE is a super conducting XFEL facility. As one of stations of SHINE, SEL will be equipped a 100PW laser system. SEL attempts to make use of the two kinds of most intense lasers, i.e. the 100PW optical laser and the TW level hard x-ray laser. The combination of the hard XFEL and the 100PW laser will initiate exploration of vacuum birefringence and other interesting science.

Mike Dunne

Director, LCLS
Associate Laboratory Director, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Professor of Photon Science, Stanford University

Theme：”‘A billion times brighter’: An overview of the revolution underway in X-ray science”

10：50 – 11：25

The past decade has seen the emergence of X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELs) as a powerful new tool, able to produce atomic resolution ‘movies’ of how atomic, chemical and biological systems evolve on ultrafast timescales. This opens up revolutionary opportunities for the study of next-generation pharmaceuticals, energy technology, quantum materials, catalysis, and the physics of the stars and planets. XFEL facilities like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) deliver femtosecond duration X-ray pulses with a peak brilliance over 9 orders of magnitude higher than synchrotron sources, with surprising degrees of flexibility for tailoring the source properties. This field is now entering another step-change, with billion-dollar investment to increase the repetition rate from ~100 Hz to 1 MHz – opening up wholly new opportunities for precision science. The high average power beams will be able to track rare and transient phenomena, or study heterogeneous systems with stochastic properties, isolated defects or buried interfaces. Access to LCLS is free and open to everyone, with over 1000 researchers from around the world selected purely on the scientific merit of the proposed experiments. This talk will cover recent progress and an provide an outlook on the major developments underway in this field.

Yoshihisa Yamamoto

Program Manager of ImPACT Program, Japan Science and Technology Agency

Theme：”Quantum Neural Network – Coherent Ising Machine, XY Machine and Recurrent Neural Network”

11：25 – 12：00

We will present the basic concept, operational principle and observed performance of a novel computing machine based on the network of degenerate optical parametric oscillators. The developed machine has 2048 spins with all-to-all connections and is now available as a cloud system via internet.

There are at least three quantum computing models proposed today: unitary quantum computation, adiabatic quantum computation and dissipative quantum computation. A gate model quantum computer implements the unitary quantum computation model and is expected to solve problems with hidden periodicity or specific structure efficiently, while a quantum neural network, including coherent Ising machine (CIM), implements the dissipative quantum computation model and is expected to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We will discuss these experimental machines and the performance comparison against modern digital computers and algorithms.