Reflections from EuPRAXIA Fellow Ana’s Secondment at SPARC

EuPRAXIA DN Fellow Ana Guisao Betancur recently took part in a four-week secondment at SPARC. During her time there, she focussed on data acquisition with their RF deflector for full bunch characterisation and in data analysis for a THz-based longitudinal diagnostics currently under development. Additionally, she had the opportunity to study and discuss the facility’s beam-driven accelerator concepts and future plans with different members of the team.

SPARC_LAB at INFN-LNF (Credit: EuPRAXIA/ A.Welsch)

EuPRAXIA partner SPARC_LAB (Sources for Plasma Accelerators and Radiation Compton with Laser And Beam), is located at INFN Frascati National Laboratory (INFN-LNF)  and is made up of a conventional high brightness RF photo-injector and a multi-hundred terawatt laser. Ana’s experience at SPARC working alongside Dr Livio Verra afforded her valuable insights into the operation and experiments carried out at the facility.

Ana is currently based at the Cockcroft Institute in the UK where she is working on ultrashort bunch length measurements with femtosecond resolution.

Looking back on her secondment, she highlighted it as a valuable experience to get to know more about this EuPRAXIA site and to connect with other researchers working in a wider range of topics in plasma accelerators.

Ana added that “the secondment was valuable and productive. It offered access to facilities that are currently not available at my institution through the operation of the accelerator and data acquisition from the control room, and it was fulfilling having the opportunity to use what I have learned in my own research to participate in discussions about their diagnostics.”