Plasma Acceleration

Plasma accelerators provide electric fields ten thousand times more intense than conventional accelerators. Particles can 'surf' off of these fields and be accelerated to energies in a centimeter sized plasma accelerator that would otherwise require hundreds of meters in a conventional device.

Laser - matter interactions can instantaneously accelerate particles on impact. Accelerated ions have a wide range of potential applications ranging from novel diagnostics to hadron and proton radiotherapy for treating cancer. A key facet of being able to realise these new techniques is our work attempting to produce a tuneable, high-quality, high-energy, narrow-spread ion beam.

In order to resolve the physics of accelerators, we've invented ultrafast diagnostics to see exactly what goes on inside the plasmas we make. We employ the use of conventional methods in combination with novel approaches - such as compressed sensing and machine learning.