Swapan Chattopadhyay

Swapan Chattopadhyay (born December 26, 1951) is

a particle accelerator physicist noted for his pioneering
contributions of innovative concepts, techniques and developments in high energy particle colliders, coherent and
incoherent light sources, ultrafast sciences in the femtoand atto- second regimes, superconducting linear accelerators and various applications of interaction of particle and light beams. He has directly contributed to
the development of many accelerators around the world,
e.g. the Super Proton-Antiproton Synchrotron at CERN,
the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley, the asymmetricenergy electron-positron collider PEP-II at Stanford, the
Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator facility (CEBAF)
at Jeerson Lab and the Free-Electron Lasers at Jeerson
and Daresbury Laboratories.

cil. He had served as the Vice-Chair, Chair-elect, Chair

and Past-Chair of the American Physical Societys Division of Physics of Beams (20072011). He has mentored
many scientists and engineers across the globe including
Asia, North America and Europe and has delivered endowed lectures throughout the world e.g. Saha Memorial
Lecture, Homi Bhabha Lecture, Raja Ramanna Memorial Lecture, and Cavendish Lecture among many.

Currently, Chattopadhyay holds the Presidential Chair

of Research, Scholarship and Artistry at Northern Illinois University (NIU) where he is Professor of Physics
and Director of Accelerator Research. Concurrently he
holds a joint appointment with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) where he is a distinguished
scientist, member of the directors senior leadership team
and director of the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between Fermilab and NIU. He was formerly the Sir John Cockcroft Chair of Physics jointly at
the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Lancaster
the First Chair of accelerator physics in UK, named
after the British Nobel Laureate credited with creating
the eld. In this role he was the Inaugural Director of the
Cockcroft Institute (UK), having been appointed in April
2007. Prior to this he served as Associate Director of
Thomas Jeerson National Accelerator Facility (2001
2007);[1] Sta/ Senior Scientist and Founding Director of
the Centre for Beam Physics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (19842001); and Scientic Attach at
CERN (1982- 1984). Having spent his early childhood in
Calcutta and Darjeeling in India, he completed his undergraduate studies as a National Scholar and National Science Talent Scholar before receiving his Ph.D. in Physics
from University of California at Berkeley in 1982. He
had held Visiting Professor appointments at University
of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, University
of Illinois at Urbana Champagne and University of Virginia at Charlottesville at various times. He is a Fellow
of the American Physical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Institute of Physics
(UK) and Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (UK) and a member of many international panels
and committees, including the International Committee
for Future Accelerators and the DESY Science Coun-

Swapan Chattopadhyay was born in Calcutta, India and

spent his impressionable early childhood years in the
Himalayan hill town of Darjeeling. His father, educated
as a chemist but trained in telecommunications via his
chosen profession, was posted, from the mid 1950s till the
early 1960s, in Darjeeling as the ocer-in-charge of
communications in the mountain districts of Darjeeling,
Sikkim, parts of Bhutan, Nepal and Tibet (now China)
on behalf of the Post, Telegraph and Telephone (PT&T)
department of India. There growing up as a young boy,
along with developing an appreciation for the regions famously exotic tea gardens and ve-mile high mountain
peaks, he was fascinated with spotting the Sputnik in the
sky and was also one of a half dozen fortunate children
who were oered hand-held mountaineering lessons by
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, upon inauguration of the pioneering Himalayan Mountaineering Institute by the governments of India and New Zealand in
1957. This started his lifelong fascination with science
on the one hand and climbing mountains and trekking on
the other, in addition to an addiction for tea. At one point
in his formative years, he had seriously considered the
profession of mountain climbing and much later in life,
has been driven to explore the remote regions of western
Tibet, the sources of the rivers Indus and Brahmaputra,
the sacred mountain Kailas and lake Manasarovar. The
Indo-China conict over the disputed territory of Tibet
and subsequent ight of Dalai Lama from Tibet into India
brought serious conicts in the mountain region, putting
considerable stress in the civilian population. He relocated with family to the metropolitan mega-city of Calcutta in the early 1960s, where he received high school
and university education. He was awarded a high school
diploma in 1967 as a National Scholar, graduating from
Ballygunge Government High School and was selected a

1 Early life and education

1.1 Early childhood

National Science Talent Scholar in a nationwide competition. The high school had also previously graduated the
internationally acclaimed Bengali lm director Satyajit
Ray, who along with another contemporary Bengali radical lm director Ritwik Ghatak, had considerable inuence on his young mind. It was in this high school, that
he was the beneciary of the gifted mentorship of the
schools legendary physics teacher, Pramatha Nath Patra.

1.2

Higher education and early career

Chattopadhyay completed his B.Sc. degree from Calcutta

University in 1970, with Honors in Physics, graduating
from St. Xaviers College, a well known institution run by
the early Jesuit clergy in India, which also boasts of having graduated the famous Indian scientist Prof. Jagadish
Chandra Bose and Indian steel tycoon Laxmi Mittal.
Caught in the turmoil of the politically vibrant and active
university community in the city of Calcutta in the state of
West Bengal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he circumvented a delayed prospect of admission into the universitys post-graduate program by joining the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, eighty miles south-west
of Calcutta, for his post-graduate studies, completing his
M.Sc. degree with specialization in Particle Physics in
1972. Hoping to combine his passion for physics with
the desire to explore nature, and upon direct invitation
from Prof. Michael Moravscik as Chair of the Physics Interview Committee of the American Physical Society, he
then joined in 1972 the Physics department of the University of Oregon at Eugene in the Pacic Northwest region
of USA, known for its rugged natural beauty. However,
over time, the draw towards the larger, diverse and vibrant campus of the University of California at Berkeley
got stronger and with direct support and recommendation
from Prof. Rudy Hwa and Prof. Berndt Crasemann while
working on research projects with them in the summers of
1973 and 1974, he joined the University of California at
Berkeley in 1974, as a Ph.D. student in the Department of
Physics. After irting for two years (1974-1976) with the
inimitable Berkeley brand of theoretical particle physics,
then known as the S-matrix and Bootstrap theories of
strong interactions, under tutelage of Prof. Georey
Chew, Chattopadhyay was attracted away by the eclectic and pragmatic charm of accelerator physics dealing
with charged particle and light beams under mentorship
of some of the most prominent accelerator pioneers in
the original accelerator laboratory created by Ernest Orlando Lawrence at Berkeley, such as: Edward J. Lofgren,
Andrew Sessler, Denis Keefe, L. Jackson Laslett and
Glen Lambertson, to name a few. In 1978, he was also
heavily inuenced by the visit of Simon van der Meer and
Carlo Rubbia to the laboratory, speaking on the possibilities of stochastic phase space cooling of antiproton beams
and the exciting possibilities with proton-antiproton collisions. He was also simultaneously being encouraged
by Prof. Owen Chamberlain, discoverer of the antipro-

CAREER

ton and a Berkeley Nobel laureate, to engage in antiproton beam research. He subsequently completed his PhD
dissertation on the timely and critical topic of stochastic
cooling of bunched beams of antiproton from the University of California (Berkeley) Physics department in 1982
and continued onto CERN as an attach scientique in
the Super Proton Antiproton Synchrotron working with
Daniel Boussard, Simon van der Meer and Carlo Rubbia,
contributing to the ongoing program of stochastic cooling of antiproton beams, which led to the discovery of
the W and Z vector bosons at CERN, and to the early
ideas of stochastic cooling of bunched beams, which
today are being applied successfully to phase space cooling of heavy ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at
Brookhaven National Laboratory, leading to exciting new
investigations of the quark-gluon plasma in gold-on-gold
collisions.

2 Career
Chattopadhyay returned to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1984, where he led and dened
the accelerator physics of the Advanced Light Source
(ALS) and contributed to the conceptual design of the
Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), pioneered the
accelerator physics which underpinned the BerkeleyStanford asymmetric B-factory (PEP-II) for CP-violation
studies, and initiated the Berkeley FEL/Femtosecond
X-ray Source and Laser-Plasma Acceleration development. He was a Senior Scientist, a Guest Professor, and
the Founder/Director of the Center for Beam Physics at
Berkeley, until his move to Thomas Jeerson National
Accelerator Facility in 2001 as the Associate Laboratory Director for Accelerators, after 25 years at the University of California and Lawrence Berkeley National
Lab. At Thomas Jeerson National Accelerator Facility, he made critical advancements in microwave superconducting linear accelerators leading the way to current and future grand instruments of science such as the
high precision CEBAF and its 12 GeV upgrade for precision research in hadronic physics, Spallation Neutron
Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA to advance neutron sciences and novel materials research, and
the current superconducting version of the International
Linear Collider, to name a few. His research at the Cockcroft Institute in UK included development of sources of
ultra-cold relativistic free electron beams to advance
coherent electron diraction techniques; production of
novel coherent and ultra-short pulses of photons (e.g. xray FELs); novel acceleration methods; investigation of
photonic crystals and metamaterial structures for charged
particle acceleration; novel high energy colliders; cavity search for dark matter and laboratory investigation of dark energy via atom interferometer techniques.
Chattopadhyay is currently working for Fermilab and
Northern Illinois University (NIU) acting as a distinctive
professor and director of accelerator research.[2] Having

3
contributed to the conception, design, construction, com- 4 Selected publications
missioning and operation of numerous accelerators for
particle and nuclear physics, photon and neutron sciences
4.1 Stochastic Phase-Space Cooling of
around the world, with signicant research accomplishRadio-Frequency Bunched Beams
ments in advanced particle and photon beam physics,[3][4]
and mentoring scientists around the world, in the devel On Stochastic Cooling of Bunches in the Collidoping nations in particular, in accelerator developments
ing Beam Mode in High Energy Storage Rings, S.
as a unifying global force among nations, Prof. ChatChattopadhyay, IEEE Trans. on Nucl. Sci., 1983,
topadhyay is a frequently invited speaker and advisor at
Vol. NS-30, No. 4, p. 2334.
professional societies and government research agencies,
serving on numerous editorial, advisory and review com Theory of Bunched Beam Stochastic Cooling, S.
mittees throughout the world.
Chattopadhyay, IEEE Trans. on Nucl. Sci., 1983,
Vol. NS-30, No. 4, p. 2649.

Notable mentees
Wim Leemans (LBNL, Berkeley, USA)
Zhentang Zhao (SINAP, Shanghai, China)
In Soo Ko (Pohang Light Source and POSTECH,
Korea)
Guimei Wang (BNL, USA)
Govindan Rangarajan (IISc, Bangalore, India)
Alexander Zholents (Argonne National Lab, USA)
Max Zolotorev (LBNL, Berkeley, USA)
John Byrd (LBNL, Berkeley, USA)
Mike Zisman (LBNL, Berkeley)
Jonathan Wurtele (UC Berkeley, USA)
Miguel Furman (LBNL, Berkeley, USA)
Mike Blaskiewicz (BNL, USA)
Robert Rimmer (Jeerson lab, USA)
Rui Li (Jeerson Lab, USA)
Lia Merminga (TRIUMF, CANADA)
Yong-Ho Chin (KEK, Japan)
Etienne Forest (KEK, Japan)
Martin Berz (MSU, USA)
Alok Chakrabarti (VECC, Kolkata, India)
Srinivas Krishnagopal (BARC/TIFR, Mumbai, India)
Graeme Burt (Lancaster University, UK)
Frank Zimmermann (CERN, Geneva, Switzerland)
Chuyu Liu (BNL, USA)

Feasibility Study of Stochastic Cooling of Bunches

in the SPS, D. Boussard, S. Chattopadhyay, G.
Dome and T. Linnecar, CERN 84-15, 1984, p. 197.
Proc. CERN Accelerator School on Antiprotons for
Colliding Beam Facilities (1984).

4.2 Synchrotron radiation sources and

free electron lasers
Design Concepts of a Storage Ring for a High
Power XUV Free Electron Laser, M. Cornacchia,
J. Bisognano, S. Chattopadhyay, A. Garren, K. Halbach, A. Jackson, K. J. Kim, H. Lancaster, J. Peterson, M. S. Zisman, C. Pellegrini and M. S. Zisman,
Nucl. Instrum. Meth. Phys. Res. A 250 (1986),
pp. 5763.
Beam Instabilities, M. Furman, J. Byrd and S.
Chattopadhyay, Chapter 12, Synchrotron Radiation Sources A Primer, World Scientic, (Herman
Winick, Ed.), Series on Synchrotron radiation Techniques and Applications Vol 1.
An infrared free electron laser system for the proposed chemical dynamics research laboratory at
LBL based on a 500 MHz superconducting linac,
K.-J. Kim, R. Byrns, S. Chattopadhyay, R. Donahue, J. Edighoer, R. Gough, E. Hoyer, W. Leemans, J. Staples, B. Taylor and M. Xie, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. Phys. Res. A 341 (1994), pp. 289
284.

4.3 Asymmetric B-Factory

Physics and Design Issues of Asymmetric Storage
Ring Colliders as B-Factories, S.

4.4 Femtosecond X-Rays

Generation of Femtosecond X-rays by 90 Thomson Scattering, K.-J. Kim, S. Chattopadhyay and
C.V. Shank, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. Phys. Res. A
341 (1994), pp. 351354.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Femtosecond X-ray Pulses at 0.4 Generated by 4.5 Microwave Superconductivity and

90 Thomson Scattering: A Tool for Probing the
Precision Beams
Structural Dynamics of Materials, R. W. Schoenlein, W. P. Leemans, A. H. Chin, P. Volfbeyn, T.
Strange-Quark Contributions to Parity-Violating
E. Glover, P. Balling, M. Zolotorev, K. J. Kim, S.
Asymmetries in the Forward G0 Electron-Proton
Chattopadhyay, and C. V. Shank, Science, 274, 11
Scattering Experiment, Collaboration G0, D. ArmOct. 1996, p. 236.
strong et al., Phys. Rev. Letts. 95, 092001 (2005).
X-Ray Based Subpicosecond Electron Bunch
Characterization Using 90 Thomson Scattering,
W. P. Leemans, R. W. Schoenlein, P. Volfbeyn, A.
H. Chin, T. E. Glover, P. Balling, M. Zolotorev, K.
J. Kim, S. Chattopadhyay, and C. V. Shank, Phys.
Rev. Letts., 77, No.20, p. 4182 (11 Nov.,1996).

Transverse Beam Spin Asymmetries in ForwardAngle Elastic Electron-Proton Scattering, Collaboration G0, D. S. Armstrong et al., Phys. Rev. Letts,
99, 092301 (2007).
Hurricane Isabel gives accelerators a severe test,
CERN Courier, January/February 2004, 44(1),
pages 3739.

Interaction of Relativistic Electrons with Ultrashort Laser Pulses: Generation of Femtosecond Xrays and Microprobing of Electron Beams, W.P. 4.6 Large Hadron Collider
Leemans, R.W.Schoenlein, P.Volfbeyn, A.H.Chin,
Accelerator Physics Challenges of the Large
T.E.Glover, P.Balling, M.Zolotorev, K.-J,Kim, S.
Hadron Collider, Indian National Academy of SciChattopadhyay and C.V.Shank, IEEE Journal of
ences, Springer Verlag, 2009.
Quantum Electronics, Vol. 33, No. 11, November
1997, p. 1925.
Alight a Beam and Beaming Light: A theme with
Variations, S. Chattopadhyay, Physics of Plasmas,
Vol. 5, Number 5, p. 2081 (1998).
Generation of Femtosecond Pulses of Synchrotron
Radiation, R. W. Schoenlein, S. Chattopadhyay, H.H.W.Chong, T.E.Glover, P.A.Heimann,
C.V.Shank, A.A.Zholents, M.S.Zolotorev, Science,
287, March 24, 2000, p. 2237.
Generation of femtosecond X-ray pulses via laserelectron beam interaction, R. Schoenlein, S. Chattopadhyay, H. H. W. Chong, T. E. Glover, P.A.
Heimann, W.P.Leemans, C.V. Shank, A. A. Zholents and M. S. Zolotorev, Appl. Phys. B 71, 1-10,
2000.
Femtosecond X-ray generation through relativistic electron beam-laser interaction, Wim Leemans, Swapan Chattopadhyay, Eric Esarey, Alexander Zholents, Max Zolotorev, Alan Chin, Robert
Schoenlein, Charles V. Shank, Compte. Rendu.
Acad. Sci. Paris, t.1, Serie IV, p. 279-296, 2000.
Inverse Compton backscattering source driven by
the multi-10 TW laser installed at Daresbury, G.
Priebe, D. Laundy, M. A. MacDonald, G. P. Diakun, S. P. Jamison, L. B. Jones, D. J. Holder, S. L.
Smith, P. J. Phillips, B. D. Fell, B. Sheehy, N. Naumova, I. V. Sokolov, S. Ter-Avetisyan, K. Spohr,
G. A. Krat, J. B. Rosenzweig, U. Schramm, F.
Gruner, G. J. Hirst, J. Collier, S. Chattopadhyay and
E. Seddon, Lasers and Particle Beams (2008), 26,
649-660, Cambridge University Press.

5 See also
List of physicists
List of Indian scientists

6 References
[1] People. CERN Courier 41 (3): 34. April 2001.
[2] Faces and places: Chattopadhyay returns to new challenges in the US (PDF). CERN Courier 54 (7): 32. February 2014.
[3] Chattopadhyay, Swapan (October 2002). Viewpoint:
Accelerators for nano- and biosciences. CERN Courier
42 (8): 46.
[4] Chattopadhyay, Swapan (March 2007). Viewpoint:
Amazing particles and light. CERN Courier 47 (2): 50.

7 External links
CockcroftInstitute
CASA
Jeerson Lab
Scientic publications of Swapan Chattopadhyay on
INSPIRE-HEP

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