Jean-Luc Vay is a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and head of the Advanced Modeling Program in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division.
Particle accelerators are among the most complex, largest, and most expensive machines ever built, with applications ranging from discovery science to national security, industry, and medicine. Progress in particle accelerator research is intimately linked to progress in the calculations of beam particle trajectories via a carefully tailored series of elements that create the electric and magnetic fields that accelerate and guide the particles. Computer simulations are thus naturally an integral part of this research. In his talk “Faster! Faster! Highlights in Particle Accelerator Research at NERSC,” Berkeley Lab Senior Scientist Jean-Luc Vay will present highlights of particle accelerator simulations performed at NERSC over the past decades as well as ongoing work and future directions for the field. The talk is part of the NERSC@50 seminar series celebrating NERSC’s 50th anniversary and will take place on Monday, August 12, at 1:30 p.m. PDT on Zoom.
Jean-Luc Vay has been a user of NERSC since he joined Berkeley Lab as a postdoc at the end of 1996. He is now a senior scientist and head of the Advanced Modeling Program in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division, where he leads theoretical and computational research on beams, plasmas, particle accelerators, and fusion energy. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a senior member of IEEE, and recipient of the 2013 US Particle Accelerator School Prize for Achievement in Accelerator Physics & Technology, 2014 NERSC Award for Innovative Use of High-Performance Computing, 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, and 2023 Berkeley Lab Director’s Achievement Award in the Scientific Team section.
About the Seminars
NERSC@50 Seminars is a limited series celebrating the center’s 50th anniversary. They feature past and current users presenting exciting and important research enabled by NERSC systems.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the mission computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), NERSC serves 11,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials sciences, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. An average of 2,000 peer-reviewed science results a year rely on NERSC resources and expertise, which has also supported the work of six Nobel prize-winning individuals and teams.
NERSC is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.