About Bill Schlotter

Bill Schlotter is an instrument scientist working on the Soft X-ray (SXR) beamline at the Linac Coherent Light Source, SLAC's X-ray free electron laser. The SXR beamline can provide intense, ultra-short soft X-ray pulses using a broad range of experimental tools such as X-ray emission, coherent imaging, resonant scattering, photoelectron spectroscopy and X-ray absorption spectroscopy. The science that can be performed at SXR covers an array of fields such as catalysis, magnetism, correlated materials, clusters and biological structures, all of which he supports in his role as instrument scientist, but Bill himself is especially interested in the dynamics of electrons in solids on ultrafast time scales. In particular he wants to understand the electronic response of these materials to ultra-short and intense pulses of X-ray and optical radiation. Bill augmented undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan with summer research positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Ford Motor Company, then continued his education at Stanford University, where he graduated with a doctorate in Applied Physics in 2007. During his time at Stanford he developed a lensless holographic technique for taking microscopic images with coherent X-rays. He followed that with postdoctoral work at the University of Hamburg, where he commissioned an X-ray pulse delay line system at the FLASH facility at DESY.