The role of empathy and perspective-taking in preventing aggressive behaviors has been highlighted in several theoretical models. In this study, we used immersive virtual reality to induce a full body ownership illusion that allows offenders to be in the body of a victim of domestic abuse. A group of male domestic violence offenders and a control group without a history of violence experienced a virtual scene of abuse in first-person perspective. During the virtual encounter, the participants’ real bodies were replaced with a life-sized virtual female body that moved synchronously with their own real movements. Participants' emotion recognition skills were assessed before and after the virtual experience. Our results revealed that offenders have a significantly lower ability to recognize fear in female faces compared to controls, with a bias towards classifying fearful faces as happy. After being embodied in a female victim, offenders improved their ability to recognize fearful female faces and reduced their bias towards recognizing fearful faces as happy. For the first time, we demonstrate that changing the perspective of an aggressive population through immersive virtual reality can modify socio-perceptual processes such as emotion recognition, thought to underlie this specific form of aggressive behaviors.

Acceleration and manipulation of electron bunches underlie most electron and X-ray devices used for ultrafast imaging and spectroscopy. New terahertz-driven concepts offer orders-of-magnitude improvements in field strengths, field gradients, laser synchronization and compactness relative to conventional radio-frequency devices, enabling shorter electron bunches and higher resolution with less infrastructure while maintaining high charge capacities (pC), repetition rates (kHz) and stability. We present a segmented terahertz electron accelerator and manipulator (STEAM) capable of performing multiple high-field operations on the 6D-phase-space of ultrashort electron bunches. With this single device, powered by few-micro-Joule, single-cycle, 0.3 THz pulses, we demonstrate record THz-acceleration of >30 keV, streaking with <10 fs resolution, focusing with >2 kT/m strength, compression to ~100 fs as well as real-time switching between these modes of operation. The STEAM device demonstrates the feasibility of THz-based electron accelerators, manipulators and diagnostic tools enabling science beyond current resolution frontiers with transformative impact.

The scope of applications that require intense and ultrafast THz fields has been increasing during the last years. Applications such as terahertz time-domain spectroscopy [1], the study of carrier dynamics in semiconductors [2], electric field gating of interlayer charge transport in superconductors [3], or THz assisted attosecond pulse generation [4] benefit from higher pulse energies than currently available, and so there is keen interest in scaling the peak power of the THz generation schemes. More recently, high peak power THz sources have been proposed for charged particle acceleration, undulation, deflection and spatiotemporal arbitrary manipulation too [5].There are different methods for generating high peak field THz pulses. Among them, difference frequency generation (DFG) and optical rectification (OR) are the most common. Sell et al. demonstrated that it is possible to use DFG between two parametrically amplified pulse trains to generate phase locked terahertz transients with peak electric fields of 10 8 MV/cm and center frequencies continuously tunable from 10 to 72 THz [6]. However, such methods typically exhibit fairly low photon conversion efficiencies due to the Manley-Rowe limit and are also restricted to high THz frequencies approaching the mid-IR spectral region due to limitations imposed by the phase matching condition in the DFG medium, such as GaSe or AgGaS 2 . Optical rectification, on the other hand, has been widely implemented to generate pulses at low THz frequencies [7]. Because the nonlinear process can be cascaded, over 100% of photon conversion efficiency has been demonstrated [8,9]. Of the common nonlinear materials used for OR, ZnTe presents the problem of free carrier absorption, limiting the total efficiency [10]. Lithium niobate presents multiple advantages such as large d eff , high damage threshold, low THz absorption, and large bandgap, but it requires tilted pulse front pumping techniques to achieve

A design for a compact x-ray light source (CXLS) with flux and brilliance orders of magnitude beyond existing laboratory scale sources is presented. The source is based on inverse Compton scattering of a high brightness electron bunch on a picosecond laser pulse. The accelerator is a novel high-efficiency standingwave linac and rf photoinjector powered by a single ultrastable rf transmitter at X-band rf frequency. The high efficiency permits operation at repetition rates up to 1 kHz, which is further boosted to 100 kHz by operating with trains of 100 bunches of 100 pC charge, each separated by 5 ns. The entire accelerator is approximately 1 meter long and produces hard x rays tunable over a wide range of photon energies. The colliding laser is a Yb∶YAG solid-state amplifier producing 1030 nm, 100 mJ pulses at the same 1 kHz repetition rate as the accelerator. The laser pulse is frequency-doubled and stored for many passes in a ringdown cavity to match the linac pulse structure. At a photon energy of 12.4 keV, the predicted x-ray flux is 5 × 10 11 photons=second in a 5% bandwidth and the brilliance is 2 × 10 12 photons=ðsec mm 2 mrad 2 0.1%Þ in pulses with rms pulse length of 490 fs. The nominal electron beam parameters are 18 MeV kinetic energy, 10 microamp average current, 0.5 microsecond macropulse length, resulting in average electron beam power of 180 W. Optimization of the x-ray output is presented along with design of the accelerator, laser, and x-ray optic components that are specific to the particular characteristics of the Compton scattered x-ray pulses.