Stepan Bulanov, a staff scientist at the BELLA Center in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in October 2024.
The society’s Council of Representatives recognized Bulanov: “For major contributions to the theoretical understanding and modeling of phenomena at the intersection of relativistic plasma physics and strong field quantum electrodynamics, as well as the study of the mechanisms behind laser ion acceleration.”
“I was extremely grateful and humbled when I received news of this honor,” said Bulanov. “Physics has and will always be essentially a team science where the most important results are the product of the collaborative effort of many scientists. In addition to recognizing my contribution to plasma physics, the appointment also recognizes the spirit of team science, which is especially noticeable here at Berkeley Lab.”
Bulanov’s research includes laser-driven ion acceleration and strong-field quantum electrodynamics, the theory underpinning the interactions of charged particles and photons interactions in the presence of strong electromagnetic fields. Laser-driven ion acceleration has attracted considerable attention recently, partly due to the increased availability of high-power laser facilities and the numerous potential applications of laser-accelerated ion beams, including, but not limited to, radiography, biomedical research, material science, and national security.
He says, “As a theoretician, I build models of ion acceleration that depend on the parameters of the laser and properties of the target. These models not only help us to understand the fundamental physics of laser-plasma interaction related to ion acceleration but also help to optimize the process of acceleration in terms of maximum achievable ion energy, maximum ion beam charge, and minimum ion beam divergence, which are often determined from what the particular application requires.”
He adds that another aspect of this work is supporting the experiments on laser ion acceleration at BELLA’s petawatt laser facility. This requires “tailoring the models so that they more closely represent experimental conditions or even consider a combination of these models to explain the results of an experiment.”
Bulanov is also working on a future multi-TeV (one trillion electronvolts) lepton collider. Such a collider could allow researchers to study fundamental particles such as electrons and neutrinos with unprecedented precision. It could reveal new physics beyond the Standard Model by allowing detailed investigations into the properties of the Higgs boson and electroweak interactions. It could also uncover new particles like heavy neutral leptons. This would be possible with an accuracy not achievable with particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider—the world’s most powerful collider—due to the cleaner collision events in lepton-lepton interactions.
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