Background
Pellegrini, Claudio was born on May 9, 1935 in Rome. Son of Edmondo and Margherita (Sabatini) Pellegrini. came to the United States, 1978.
Pellegrini, Claudio was born on May 9, 1935 in Rome. Son of Edmondo and Margherita (Sabatini) Pellegrini. came to the United States, 1978.
He was educated at the Sapienza University of Rome where he received the Laurea in Fisica summa cum laude in 1958 and the Libera Docenza, in 1965.
From 1958 to 1978, he worked at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati for high energy and nuclear physics. In the early 1960s, he was at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA) in Copenhagen, working on an alternative formulation of the theory of general relativity using tetrad fields to obtain, among other things, a better description of the energy-momentum complex. In 1989, he accepted an appointment at the University of California at Los Angeles (University of California, Los Angeles) as a professor of physics, and later became a Distinguished Professor.
At the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, he worked on the development of electron-positron colliders.
He studied the physics of particle beams in accelerators, specifically instabilities and collective effects in high intensity particle beams resulting from the interaction of the particles with a self-generated electromagnetic field In 1968 he discovered a novel collective effect, the Head-Tail-Instability, which limits the luminosity of a collider.
The theory suggested a way to control the instability that has been applied to all colliders and storage rings, increasing the collider luminosity and extending their reach to explore elementary particle physics. At Brookhaven, he studied free electron lasers (FELs) and their application to the generation of high intensity coherent X-ray pulses.
In 1992, based on these studies, he proposed building an X-ray FEL at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory based on self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) in order to create femtosecond long, one angstrom, coherent, X-ray pulses.
From 1998-2001, Pellegrini and his collaborators demonstrated experimentally the validity of the SASE theory. This work and the 1992 proposal led to the construction of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the first 1-angstrom X-ray laser, which has been successfully operating at SLAC since 2009. LCLS has opened a new window for the exploration of atomic and molecular science at the one angstrom-one femtosecond length and time scale characteristic of these phenomena.
In 2014, he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award by United States. President Barack Obama with the citation “Foreign pioneering research advancing understanding of relativistic electron beams and free-electron lasers, and for transformative discoveries profoundly impacting the successful development of the first hard x-ray free-electron laser, heralding a new era for science.”.
Quotations: “Foreign pioneering research advancing understanding of relativistic electron beams and free-electron lasers, and for transformative discoveries profoundly impacting the successful development of the first hard x-ray free-electron laser, heralding a new era for science.”.
Fellow American Physical Society (Executive Committee particle beam division since 1988).
Married Maria Grazia Tomassetti, December 27, 1961. Children: Luca, Matteo, Flavia.