XFEL: European XFEL Young Scientist Award for Jiawei Yan

Dr. Jiawei Yan was awarded the 2,000-euro prize for young scientists for the development of methods for generating ultrashort high-power pulses at the SASE2 line of the European XFEL.

He and a team from the FEL Physics group of the European XFEL and the MXL group at DESY, which is responsible for the operation of the XFEL, developed a method to achieve remarkably sharp current profiles with high peak currents. Both properties are crucial for the generation of high-power attosecond pulses. "The generation of ultrashort, intense pulses in the hard X-ray regime is an innovative, highly promising contribution to the portfolio of our facility," says Gianluca Geloni, head of the FEL physics group at the European XFEL. "These short pulses can be used to study samples before significant electron excitations take place and can be seen as an important step towards truly damage-free structure determination," he explains.

Yan developed a non-linear compression in the magnetic baffle that compresses the electron beams. Space charge and coherent radiation effects amplify this effect in the accelerator. The method convinced the jury of the User Organization, which awarded the prize yesterday at the annual User Meeting, especially as recent experiments at the European XFEL led by Yan were extremely successful.