The scientific work carried out by Prof. Allen Caldwell currently includes the development of novel particle accelerator technology based on plasma wakefields, the study of the quarks and gluons and their interactions, the fundamental properties of neutrinos and, more recently, the search for a new candidate for Dark Matter - axions. In addition, he has a great interest in probability and statistics, and lectures on data analysis techniques and Monte Carlo methods at the Technical University of Munich.
The plasma based accelerator experiment is explained in the video How can plasma and proton beams be used in building next generation particle accelerators?
Prof. Caldwell was born in Verdun/France in 1959 and has the double citizenship of the USA and France. He studied physics at Rice University in Texas, then moved to the University of Wisconsin where he earned his doctorate. He then spent 15 years at Columbia University, where he eventually became professor. In 1997, he became head of the ZEUS experiment at the HERA accelerator at DESY in Hamburg. In 1999, he was made director of the Nevis Laboratory at Columbia University in New York; since 2002 he has been a Member of the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He currently heads the AWAKE experiment at CERN .
