In laser-plasma acceleration the laser, literally, comes first. We strongly believe, that to generate the best possible plasma electron beams, one needs to meticulously control and understand the whole setup, starting with the laser, the laser-plasma interaction, to, finally, the application.
We therefore have a strong focus on laser R&D. In addition, we design our own plasma accelerator beam line including the undulator for x-ray generation. Members of our group are lead developers of the particle-in-cell code FBPIC, which has been widely adopted by the community. This cohesive approach is key to our work.
We started as a research group at Hamburg University. Since then, we are operating the ANGUS 100 TW, 1 Hz repetition rate drive laser. With ANGUS, we first tested our (then unqiue) approach to treat an LPA drive laser just like a klystron, automating the laser as much as possible, and fully integrating it into a modern controls system with continuous single-shot data acquisition
With LUX, we first tested our ideas of merging plasma-acceleration with modern accelerator technology. LUX is fully integrated into DOOCS, DESYs control system and backbone of its large scale user facilities. Over the years we added many beam optic elements and modern diagnostics. Typically, we generate 300 MeV electron beams at 1 Hz repetition rates. Our pioneering work on machine learning at laser-plasma accelerators, and our first steps in decoding the sources of energy variability, have happened at LUX.
We support our experimental efforts with both theoretical studies and Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations. Here, our emphasis lies on methods to improve the electron beam quality in terms of divergence, emittance and energy spread, as well as diagnostic methods. In order to provide ever more accurate modeling tools and making them available to the research community, we actively contribute to (open-source) PIC code development together with our collaborators from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Undulator Radiation
Undulator Radiation
We develop and build undulators, specifically designed to be driven by plasma generated electron beams. We successfully generated plasma-driven undulator radiation down to 4 nm wavelength (using the BEAST II undulator). We recently commissioned FROSTY, a 2 m in-vacuum undulator of 15 mm period length.