The EU-funded THRILL project (Technology for High-Repetition-Rate Intense Laser Laboratories) [1] gathers the forces of several institutions within a consortium to develop technologies, which will enable the operation of high-energy lasers at increased repetition rates. The overall goal of the project is to identify the most appropriate architecture of the next generation high-energy-laser...
In this talk, we discuss a deep learning model approach that uses messy data to learn the mapping between experimental parameters -> electron spectra. Many laser facilities, e.g. ZEUS at University of Michigan, have pre-existing operational procedures that produce "real-world” datasets where data are recorded manually and with assumptions and omissions. These do not necessarily provide clean...
Bivoj laser system is located at Hilase center near Prague, Czechia. While built around DiPOLE technology (cryogenically cooled Yb:YAG multi-slab laser system), it has been upgraded to reach higher output energies up to 1.5 KW of average power (150 J / 10 Hz) and the problem of so called depolarization has been successfully addressed, which led to reduction of depolarization losses from ~30%...
The Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) in Munich is home to the ATLAS-3000 high power laser dedicated to research on laser-driven electron as well as ion acceleration and applications thereof.
The “Advanced Ti:Sapphire Laser” (ATLAS) is designed to deliver around 70J of pulse energy after compression in a ~27fs short pulse at a repetition rate of 1Hz. At this repetition rate, the...
Laser-plasma acceleration (LPA) aims to accelerate particles by exploiting the large electric field that can be achieved in a plasma. This field exceeds its counterparts in the rf-linacs and thus promises compact alternatives for the conventional accelerators.
The LPA process is highly non-linear and depends on a large number of laser and plasma parameters that make its optimization...
The identification of prospective scenarios for observing quantum vacuum signals in high-intensity laser experiments requires both accurate theoretical predictions and the exploration of high-dimensional parameter spaces. Numerical simulations address the first requirement, while optimization provides an efficient solution for the second one. In the present work, we put forward Bayesian...
Peking University is developing a proton radiotherapy system based on a petawatt-class laser accelerator (Compact laser plasma accelerator-II, CLAPA-II). Given the ultrashort pulse duration of laser-accelerated proton beams, the dose rate per pulse can reach up to billions of grays per second. This gives laser proton radiotherapy systems unique advantages in FLASH radiotherapy for malignant...
An essential part of the high-energy laser system PHELIX is its front-end which allows to achieve highest contrast levels of about twelve orders of magnitude with respect to the amplified spontaneous emission. Similar to other high-contrast systems, its technology heavily relies on the exploitation of nonlinear effects, specifically ultrafast optical parametric amplification (uOPA), rendering...
High-speed and high-resolution image capture is a fundamental component of the analysis of interactions between lasers and plasmas in laser plasma accelerator experiments. However, traditional methods of image transmission are subject to significant bandwidth and latency restrictions. In this paper, we propose an Ethernet-based Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) transmission system, which...
Constructing an Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) power plant faces major challenges, especially in managing high-power drive lasers subject to intense thermal loads and dynamic beam distortions. These issues degrade performance and exceed the capacity of current localized control methods, underscoring the need for integrated, systemic solutions. The Adaptive Laser Architecture Development and...
The complexity of modern scientific facilities, particularly cleanrooms, requires precise control over environmental parameters such as temperature and humidity to ensure experimental accuracy. These facilities, often energy-intensive, face additional challenges due to climate change and the growing demand for energy efficiency. This drives the need for a simulation framework capable of...
One of the goals of the laser ion acceleration research at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden – Rossendorf, Germany, is to develop a reliable accelerator system based on a cryogenic jet target. To ensure a high reliability, these jets must have a high position stability. Therefore, the position fluctuations of such a cryogenic cylindrical hydrogen target are investigated. For this purpose, an...
In past years, novel methods for generating ultralow emittance electron beams have been developed, offering compact particle sources with exceptional beam quality ideal for future high-energy physics experiments and free-electron lasers. Recent theoretical work has proposed a laser-based technique capable of resolving emittances below the 0.1 mm mrad regime by modulating the electron phase...
Laser-plasma interactions generate x-ray radiation via numerous mechanisms. The x-ray spectral distribution is typically broadband and can span from keV to tens or hundreds of MeV energies with minor changes to the interaction conditions. Characterising this emission in detail provides greater understanding to the underlying physics and paves the way to optimising these novel sources for...
HELPMI is a 2-year project with the framework of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, conducted by GSI, HI Jena and HZDR. The aim is to start the development of a F.A.I.R. data standard for experimental data of the entire laser-plasma (LPA) community. Such standard does not yet exist, but it would facilitate management and analysis of usually quite heterogeneous experimental data and logs by...
Laser-driven plasma accelerators (LPA) are compact sources of ultra-short, intense proton pulses in the multi-10-MeV energy range. These unique parameters predestine LPAs as powerful tools for ultra-high dose rate radiobiology research. To promote further sophisticated radiobiological studies at LPAs, automated setups for proton acceleration and beamline operation are required.
Key...
Plasma-based accelerators hold the potential to achieve mulit-giga-volt-per-metre accelerating gradients, offering a promising route to more compact and cost-effective accelerators for future light sources and colliders. However, plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA) is often a nonlinear, high-dimensional process that is sensitive to jitters in multiple input parameters, making the setup,...
Most characteristics of ultra-short laser pulses can be obtained by measuring the integrated spectrum or only slices in space. However, Spatio-Temporal Couplings (STCs) may influence the laser performance. Common measurement techniques usually either rely on scanning over hundreds of shots, are only sensitive to low order effects like the Pulse-Front Tilt (PFT) or have the trade-off of...
In order to solve the problem of the large beam divergence in fast ignition schemes and increase the laser energy deposition on the target core. We systematically studied the relationship between the guiding and acceleration of target surface electrons (TSE) and laser parameters in previous works[1]. The beam quality is found to depend critically on the intensity ratio of the laser prepulse...
Laser electron accelerators are emerging as compact sources for high-quality relativistic electron beams, following the increasing demand from areas such as material science, health, particle physics, and astrophysics. Each application, such as driving a Free Electron Laser, requires specific electron beam properties and their stability, both shot-to-shot and long-time scale. As laser...
In this contribution, we present results of an extensive study of LWFA driven by ATLAS-3000 at CALA in Garching, yielding GeV-scale electrons. By monitoring numerous laser and electron diagnostics in parallel during LWFA experiments at a 0.25 Hz repetition rate, we find that, among all parameters monitored, the laser wavefront exhibits the highest correlation with electron energy. The largest...
We present an overview of the ebeam4therapy project at the Weizmann Institute of Science aimed at developing the technology for very-high-energy electron (VHEE) radiotherapy based on a laser-plasma accelerator and focus on the optimization of simulations for the project. A core objective of the project is to reduce the cost of potential medical devices by reducing the required laser energy. By...
In this talk, we will explore the current development of PIConGPU in machine learning-based simulations for plasma acceleration and highlight three key applications. These projects mark significant advances in the integration of AI and advanced data workflows into plasma physics research with PIConGPU. They illustrate not only our current methods, but also our vision for future in-transit...
This talk reviews intelligent automation systems being developed for laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) center in collaboration with Berkeley Accelerator Controls and Instrumentation (BACI) program. For the next generation high average power fiber lasers we showed efficient and stable coherent laser combining in space and time with Field Programmable...
Plasma acceleration has seen tremendous progress over the past years demonstrating competitive beam quality from compact setups. However, plasma accelerators live on a very complex non-linear parameter space, which makes it very challening to, first, identify an optimum working point, and then, second, to operate the plasma accelerator reliably at this point with reproducible beams.
The...
Laser-driven plasma accelerators (LPA) are compact sources of ultra-short, intense proton pulses in the multi-10-MeV energy range. These unique parameters predestine LPAs as powerful tools for ultra-high dose rate radiobiology research. To promote further sophisticated radiobiological studies at LPAs, automated setups for proton acceleration and beamline operation are required.
In this...
Laser plasma based particle accelerators have attracted great interest in fields where conventional accelerators reach limits based on size, cost or beam parameters. However, laser accelerators have not yet reached their full potential in producing simultaneous high-radiation doses at high particle energies. To overcome limitations a high degree of control of the plasma conditions is needed,...
Advances in laser technology are pushing the repetition-rate of petawatt scale lasers into the multi-Hz regime. As repetition-rates increase, novel target and diagnostic solutions are required to fully exploit the latest laser facilities. Nanometer scale solid-density foils currently exhibit the most promising ion acceleration mechanisms for applications, reaching > 100 MeV, however slow...
Laser-Plasma Acceleration (LPA) is a highly non-linear process sensitively dependent on parameters of gas flow and laser which are hard to control or simultaneously measure in experiments. Understanding of such parameter dependencies can be driven by simulations which offer control and observability, but are more expensive the more physical details are included. In the case of LPA, full 3D...
The ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, located at Harwell Campus, is a pulsed neutron source used to study the structure and dynamics of materials. This talk will explore ongoing efforts to leverage machine learning to improve efficiency and reliability of the accelerator sections used to deliver high energy protons to the targets. Examples will demonstrate applications of machine learning...
Thermal effects in optical elements as well as subtle changes in the experimental environment (e.g. airflow, humidity, vibrations) are well-known challenges affecting laser alignment. These effects tend to scale with the size and complexity of the laser systems. For high-power lasers comprising a multitude of amplification stages, the resulting long-term drifts (occurring over minutes to...
Controlling the delivery of kHz-class pulsed lasers is of interest in a variety of industrial and scientific applications, from next-generation laser-plasma acceleration to laser-based x-ray emission and high-precision manufacturing. The transverse position of the laser pulse train on the application target is often subject to fluctuations by external drivers (e.g., room cooling and heating...
We have demonstrated real-time automatic compensation of measured angular dispersion, achieving a stability within 1.4 nrad/nm. The applied algorithm uses the calculated dispersion from a new diagnostic, on shot, and adjusts the positions of a set of two glass prisms to achieve a zero, or non-zero, constant angular dispersion magnitude and direction. The project has been extended to compensate...
As part of the THRILL project, we are working on different architectures for high-energy, high-repetition-rate laser amplification. We are particularly interested in coherent beam combination, an original scaling approach already proving its worth for fiber or small-diameter laser systems. Some of the main challenges when trying to adapt this technology to high-energy laser chains, include the...
The PHELIX laser system utilizes multiple wavefront control systems, which require seamless integration into the primary laser control system for daily operation. Over the years, significant effort has gone into optimizing this integration. We detail the initial development stages with our standalone software, WOMBAT, and the gradual incorporation of these capabilities into the PHELIX Control...
The ATLAS-3000 is a Petawatt class Ti:Sa laser located at the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA) in Munich, Germany. The laser operates at a 1Hz repetition rate and the beam can be guided into several different experiment areas for e.g., laser particle acceleration experiments.
The laser chain contains a total of three deformable mirrors before the main amplification stage, before...
Bivoj laser system is located at Hilase center near Prague, Czechia. It incorporates two adaptive optics systems (AOS). One for each of its two cryogenically cooled main amplifiers, both of which work with a square flat-top beam profile. First AOS deals with aberrations of the 10J amplifier with beam size of 21.5 x 21.5 mm2 and composes of a bimorph Deformable Mirror (DM) and a Quadri-wave...
Many applications require an ultrafast laser source with excellent long-term stability. One example is laser plasma acceleration (LPA), where the properties of the drive laser pulse directly determine those of the accelerated electron beam. Therefore, the highest possible laser stability is required for reliable long-term operation of the LPA. In the high-energy drive lasers of LPA, even the...
In this presentation we will first go through an overview of the Apollon multi-PW laser facility, discussing in some detail the architecture and the current performances of the system. In the second part of this talk we will focus on the focal spot quality stability requirements of Apollon and present our first results on what is to our knowledge the first active wavefront stabilization...
Adaptive Optics (AO) have revolutionized astronomy and enabled optical imaging down to ~15 mas resolution on today's largest telescopes. The resulting image stability and contrast have, in turn, allowed us to probed the close-in environment of neighboring stars, peeking at dust and debris disks, and blossoming exoplanets. In this talk, I will present recent results and technical capabilities...
Laser beam alignment is a non-trivial and time-consuming problem native to a multitude of present-day experiments. We introduce a reinforcement learning-based laser beam alignment system that learns to align a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and an off-axis parabolic mirror with live optimization correcting for beam drift or externally introduced mirror misalignment. The algorithm manages to find...
For an autonomous system like high frequency Adaptative loop, the problem of interfacing with facility SCADA/Tango can be difficult. We have two main options: restrict the interactions for only settings and monitoring the correction parameters. The other option demands more resource as we should manage a separated physical machine on dedicated network to insure the 10ms computation and...
The PLANET project aims at developing the first laser-driven neutron source optimized for commercial application. The system exploits the unique properties of a laser-source by utilizing simultaneously both fast neutrons and MeV x-rays to image through heavy shielding material. The goal of the project is to demonstrate imaging and material discrimination of the content of a medium level...
The DRACO Ti:Sa laser system at HZDR employs various automated procedures. We will report from daily operation experience on
- pump and shutter control
- beam stabilization
- spectral shaping
- trigger and delay management
We will also discuss current developments of data acquisition and live processing as well as the transition process to AI-based beam stabilization, spectral shaping...
