Jie Wei

Professor of Physics, FRIB Accelerator Systems Division Director

About

  • Joined the laboratory in August 2010
  • Accelerator physics and engineering
  • Contact information

Education and training

  • BS, Physics, Tsinghua University, China, 1983
  • PhD, Physics, Stony Brook University, 1989

Research

My scientific research involves accelerator physics of high-energy colliders and high-intensity hadron accelerators, beam cooling and crystallization, development of spallation neutron sources, development of compact pulsed hadron sources, development of hadron therapy facilities, development of accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor programs for thorium energy utilization and nuclear waste transmutation, and development of accelerators for rare-isotope beams. Our team covers accelerator research and engineering fields of superconducting material and technology, low-temperature cryogenics, permanent and electromagnetic magnets and power supplies, radio-frequency vacuum, beam diagnostics instrumentation and electronics, accelerator controls and machine protection, and beam collimation and shielding. Design, research and development, construction, commissioning, and upgrading of the FRIB accelerator complex involves fascinating and challenging work across multiple disciplines at Michigan State University, and collaborations with major accelerator institutes and laboratories in the United States and throughout the world.

I serve as the FRIB Accelerator Systems Division Director responsible for the design, research and development, construction, commissioning, and operations of the accelerator complex. My team includes accelerator faculty and a staff of subject-matter experts, many from major national laboratories and institutes worldwide. The accelerators at FRIB are among the most powerful and technically demanding hadron accelerators in the world. The design and development of the FRIB driver accelerator requires the most advanced knowledge in accelerator physics and engineering involving beam dynamics with electroncyclotron-resonance (ECR) ion sources, radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) linear accelerators (linacs), superconducting RF linacs, space charges and beam halos, charge-stripping mechanisms based on solid film, liquid-metal film, and gases, high-power targetry, mechanisms of beam loss, collimation, and collection, mechanisms of vibration, microphonics, and compensation, and mechanisms of gas dissorption, electron cloud, and mitigations, and rare-isotope beams.

Biography

I started my career pursuing a PhD in accelerator physics at State University of New York at Stony Brook. My research topics were performance limiting beam dynamics mechanisms with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). During the next 35 years, my research has been on accelerator physics and engineering pertaining to frontier accelerator facilities including RHIC at BNL, the U.S. part of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, Thomas Jefferson, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Laboratories, the China Spallation Neutron Source project, the Compact Pulsed Hadron Source in China, and now FRIB. The accelerator profession is so uniquely rewarding in that a physical idea can be turned into reality through the execution of a construction project. Throughout its completion, one experiences endless learning in physics, technology, teamwork, and creating friendships.

Scientific publications