John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science
The particle accelerator physics group is part of the John Adams Institute, a joint venture between Royal Holloway, the University of Oxford and Imperial College London.
Accelerators are complex devices to create beams of high energy particles, these could be for industrial processing, treating cancer and particle physics at world's largest particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Accelerators are challenging systems and research and development are needed to create, higher energy, more stable, efficient, performant machines.
Accelerator physics is a wide discipline encompassing, mechanics, relativity, electromagnetism, optics, dynamical systems and instrumentation.
Research
The main research areas at Royal Holloway involve:
- the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) — the upgrade to the LHC,
- the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) — future lepton colliders,
- beam loss simulations using Beam Delivery Simulation (BDSIM) software,
- medical accelerator simulations of facilities which use protons and X-rays to treat cancer,
- beam instrumentation through the development of devices to measure the position, charge, length, energy, and polarisation of high energy beams, and
- advanced dielectric wakefield acceleration.
Members
Academics
| Prof Stephen Gibson | Group leader, deputy director of JAI - HL-LHC and FETs |
| Dr Pavel Karataev | Beam radiation and instrumentation |
| Prof Stewart Boogert | Visiting Professor BDSIM |
Senior scientists
| Mr Gary Boorman | Senior Research Officer |
| Dr Alexey Lyapin | Visiting Senior Research Officer |
Researchers
| Dr Siobhan Alden | Research Fellow in Accelerator Physics |
| Dr Alessio Bosco | Research Associate |
| Dr William Shields | Research Associate |
Research students
| Majid Ali | PhD student |
| Max Bosman | PhD student |
| Alec Clapp | PhD student |
| Diya Dipac | PhD student |
| Luke Eddowes | MSc Physics by Research |
| Alex Keyken | PhD student |
| Mark McCallum | PhD student |
| Robert Murphy | PhD student |
| Giusy Passarelli | PhD student |
| Matt Pereira | PhD student |
| Florian Stummer | PhD student |
Alumni
| Dr Helene Guerin | PhD 2024 |
| Dr Daniele Butti | PhD 2024 |
| Thomas Bass | MSc by Research 2024 |
| Dr Siobhan Alden | PhD 2023 |
| Dr Theodoros Christodoulou | PhD 2023 |
| Dr Helene Lefebvre | PhD 2023 |
| Dr Daniel Harryman | PhD 2022 |
| Dr Gian Luigi D'Alessandro | PhD 2022 |
| Dr Kirill Fedorov | PhD 2022 |
| Dr Andrei Oleinik | PhD 2022 |
| Dr Niki Vitoratou | PhD 2021 |
| Srinidhi Rajagopalan | MSc Euromasters 2021 |
| Dr Thomas Hofmann | Honorary Research Associate |
| Dr Robert Kieffer | Project Associate CERN |
| Dr Andrey Abramov | PhD 2020 |
| Dr Swann Levasseur | PhD 2020 |
| Dr Stuart Walker | PhD 2020 |
| Dr Michele Bergamaschi | PhD 2019 |
Selected publications
- BDSIM: An Accelerator Tracking Code with Particle-Matter Interactions. arXiv:1808.10745
- Direct Observation of Incoherent Cherenkov Diffraction Radiation in the Visible Range. Physical Review Letters, Vol. 121, No. 5, 054802, 01.08.2018.
- Experimental Validation of a Novel Compact Focusing Scheme for Future Energy-Frontier Linear Lepton Colliders. Physical Review Letters, Vol. 112, No. 3, 24.01.2014.
- Comparison between simulated and observed LHC beam backgrounds in the ATLAS experiment at Ebeam = 4 TeV. Journal of Instrumentation, 10.10.2018
Masters and PhD projects
- Beam-line simulation using BDSIM
- HL-LHC beam instrumentation
- FETS beam instrumentation
- Advanced acceleration
PhD Funding
There is PhD funding available within the Centre for Particle Physics group. For more information please check here.
