Speaker
Luca Serafini
(MI)
Description
Nuclear Photonics is an emerging field of physics research, promising
new advancements both in fundamental knowledge of nuclear physics, and
in envisioning new technologies for nuclear engineering, mainly in the
fields of national security and radioactive waste treatment, and,
eventually, astrophysics related studies. The advent of this new
reasearch field is made possible by the onset of new kind of gamma ray
sources, based on Compton back-scattering of high brightness electron
beams by high intensity lasers. These sources aim at producing spectral
densities up to 4 orders of magnitude higher than present bremstrahlung
conventional sources, with very narrow bandwidth beams of gamma photons,
down to 0.1%. We will discuss the rationale of these new tecnhology, and
a practical example of a project presently under design in the context
of the european ELI-NP initiative.