Jorge Rocca

Dr. Jorge Rocca is a University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Physics at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the development of high power lasers, and the study of ultra-intense laser interactions with matter. His group is known for contributions to the development and physics of bright table-top soft X-ray lasers, including the demonstration of the first table-top soft X-ray laser, and their application in several fields including nanoscience and nanotechnology and the diagnostics of dense plasmas. His group has developed a multi-Hz repetition rate Petawatt-class laser, ALEPH (Advance Laser for Extreme Photonics), that is the basis of CSU’s LaserNet US user facility, and kilowatt-level average power high pulse energy picosecond solid state lasers.

Recently his group showed that intense laser irradiation of ordered nanostructures creates an ultra-high energy density plasma regime leading to multi-Gigabar pressures, extreme degree of ionization, record conversion efficiency into picosecond X-rays pulses, and micro-scale fusion. The results are published in more than 300 peer-reviewed journal papers. He received the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science from the American Physical Society (APS), and the Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics. He is a Fellow of the APS, the Optical Society of America, and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He received an IEEE LEOS Distinguished Lecturer Award. Early in his career, he was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and recently became a Vannevar Bush DOD Fellow.