Archie Bott, Postdoctoral Researcher
I am an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Scholar working with Peter Norreys, Gianluca Gregori and Alexander Schekochihin. I have just finished my DPhil (Merton College, 2015-19, supervised by Profs. Gregori and Schekochihin), fulfilling a central role in an experimental project investigating the phenomenon of magnetic field amplification in turbulent plasmas via the small-scale turbulent dynamo mechanism. A collaboration led by Prof. Gregori has recently executed experiments on the OMEGA laser facility, successfully creating a turbulent laser-plasma dynamo in the laboratory for the first time. My research on extracting magnetic field statistics and `maps' of stochastic fields using the proton radiography technique was essential for meeting the experiment’s primary goal. The results of the first experiment have been published in Nature Communications; the importance of this work is further demonstrated by the recent award to Prof. Gregori and other senior collaborators of the American Physical Society’s 2019 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research.At present, I am working on a number of exciting projects. Most relevantly for the Prize Scholarship, I have proposed a new technique for characterising the evolution of ultra-strong magnetic fields in hot, dense laser-plasmas, by determining how the spectrum of scattered light originating from a laser probe can be altered by the presence of magnetic fields with sufficient strength. The theoretical underpinning for this work has been published in Physical Review E recently; at the moment, I am working with Prof. Norreys and Prof. Gregori to design and then propose a related proof-of-principle experiment to be carried out at the European XFEL. In parallel with this, with the expert help of Prof. Norreys’ group I am continuing to extend the range of applicability of my work on proton radiography
Email:
archie.bott@physics.ox.ac.uk
Oxford Physics Page: https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/bott
