Brian McNeil
Senior Lecturer

Brian McNeil

Brian McNeil studied for both his physics degrees, BSc (1983) and PhD (1987), at Heriot-Watt University in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. Following this, he worked in both Italy and the Netherlands for four years as a post-doc and on a Fellowship from Royal Society at the Universities of Milan and Twente. He then returned to the UK, taking up a position at the UKAEA Culham laboratory where he spent just over a year before returning to his native Scotland at the University of Strathclyde. Brian took a year away from his research to obtain a Post Graduate Certificate in Education in 1995.

Brian’s greatest personal achievement is winning the Dunlop Hackers’ Annual Golf Outing wooden-spoon so many times, he is now entitled to keep it.

| e: b.w.j.mcneil strath.ac.uk | t: 0141 548 4727 | u: http://cnqo.phys.strath.ac.uk/ |

Research

A large body of Brian McNeil’s work is based upon both detailed analytic and numerical analyses of the self-consistent interactions that occur between charged particle beams and both static electric/magnetic fields and electromagnetic fields. Such interactions form the basis of important generators of coherent electromagnetic radiation, such as the Free-Electron Laser (FEL) and the Cyclotron Resonance Maser (CRM). He has also studied similar interactions with classical dielectric particles and cold atoms. Most of this work has been carried out with his collaborators at Milan, Twente and STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory. At Strathclyde his main collaborations are with Dr Gordon Robb.

Brian is currently closely involved with the STFC’s New Light Source (NLS) project and was a co-author of the 4GLS Conceptual Design Report. In addition to work on various aspects of the NLS design, he is investigating analytical and numerical methods of describing Free Electron Laser interactions for the next generation of FEL simulation codes.

He was recently invited to the Brazilian Centre for Research in Physics, under the auspices of the Brazilian Government Ministry of Science and Technology, to advise them on the first Free Electron Laser programme for South America.

Together with Dino Jaroszynski he obtained an EPSRC grant ‘Extending Public Understanding of Physics Research Through Photography and Poetry'. This was awarded under the Government’s Partnerships for Public Understanding of Science programme. The work appeared at several venues including the International Edinburgh Science Festival and the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.

Teaching

Current undergraduate courses I teach are 3rd year ‘Thermodynamics & Statistical Physics’ and 2nd year ‘Properties of Matter’. I also give graduate lectures on advanced light sources as part of the SUPA Graduate School and the Cockcroft Institute programmes. Brian currently supervises three PhD students.

Highlights

Attosecond pulse research described in the research newsletter

Member of Program Committee for International Free Electron Laser Conference
Member of UK STFC International Advisory Committee for 4th Generation Light Source (4GLS)
Invited lecturer at the Nordic and European Summer School on synchrotron Radiation
Invited speaker at the Workshop on Fundamental Physics, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (2006)
Invited speaker at the International Free Electron Laser Conference, Berlin (2006)
Invited speaker at the NLS Workshop on Advanced Photon Sources, Daresbury (2008)
Member of the New Light Source "Ultra-fast electron dynamics and attosecond science" working group
Prediction of method for generating spatiotemporal electromagnetic pulses able to resolve the workings of an atom (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.203901)

Selected publications

B.W.J.McNeil, N.R.Thompson, D.J.Dunning, B.Sheehy, "High harmonic attosecond pulse train amplification in a free electron laser", J. Phys. B 44, 065404 (2011) doi: 10.1088/0953-4075/44/6/065404

B.W.J.McNeil, N.R.Thompson, "X-ray free-electron lasers", Nat. Photonics 4, 814-821 (2010) doi: 10.1038/nphoton.2010.239

B.W.J.McNeil, "First light from hard X-ray laser", Nat. Photonics 3, 375-377 (2009) doi: 10.1038/nphoton.2009.110

N.R.Thompson, B.W.J.McNeil, "Mode locking in a free-electron laser amplifier", Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 203901 (2008) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.203901

B.W.J.McNeil, "Free-electron lasers - A down-sized design", Nat. Photonics 2, 522-524 (2008) doi: 10.1038/nphoton.2008.164

B.W.J.McNeil, J.A.Clarke, D.J.Dunning, G.J.Hirst, H.L.Owen, N.R.Thompson, B.Sheehy, P.H.Williams, "An XUV-FEL amplifier seeded using high harmonic generation", New J. Phys. 9, 82 (2007) doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/9/4/082

B.W.J.McNeil, N.R.Thompson, D.J.Dunning, J.G.Karssenberg, P.J.M.van der Slot, K.J.Boller, "A design for the generation of temporally-coherent radiation pulses in the VUV and beyond by a self-seeding high-gain free electron laser amplifier", New J. Phys. 9, 239 (2007) doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/9/7/239

B.W.J.McNeil, G.R.M.Robb, M.W.Poole, N.R.Thompson, "Harmonic lasing in a free-electron-laser amplifier", Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 084801 (2006) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.96.084801

G.R.M.Robb, B.W.J.McNeil, "Sum-frequency generation in an ultracold atomic gas due to collective atomic recoil", J. Phys. B 39, 4593-4603 (2006) doi: 10.1088/0953-4075/39/22/004

G.R.M.Robb, B.W.J.McNeil, "Four-wave mixing with self-phase matching due to collective atomic recoil", Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 023901 (2005) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.023901

B.W.J.McNeil, G.R.M.Robb, M.W.Poole, "Two-beam free-electron laser", Phys. Rev. E 70, 035501 (2004) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.70.035501

B.W.J.McNeil, M.W.Poole, G.R.M.Robb, "Unified model of electron beam shot noise and coherent spontaneous emission in the helical wiggler free electron laser", Phys. Rev. ST Accel. Beams 6, 070701 (2003) doi: 10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.6.070701

Current Grants