The last few months have seen a number of PhD students from the Cockcroft Institute completing their thesis and taking a step forward in their research careers.
Dr Jacob Kelly, affiliated to the University of Manchester, earned his doctorate on 17th November 2021 with a thesis entitled “A Superconducting Cyclotron for the Production of 70 MeV Protons”. The work was supervised by Prof Hywel Owen (ASTeC), Prof Roger Jones (University of Manchester), Dr Andrzej Kacperek (formerly Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, now UCL) and Dr Timothy Antaya (Antaya Science and Technology).
The thesis presented a design for the first superconducting cyclotron at 70 MeV for ocular proton therapy. The proposed machine has a diameter of just 1.4 m and a mass of 12 tonnes, which is 90% less than existing resistive 70 MeV cyclotrons, and ten times more efficient.
Jacob’s PhD was part of the Accelerators for Security, Health and Environment (ASHE) program to collaborate with industry, and he now continues to work with Antaya with a view to constructing a prototype of the 70 MeV cyclotron.
Dr Louise Cowie, who is a senior RF scientist at ASTeC, earned a doctorate from Lancaster University on 21st March. Her thesis, entitled “Normal Conducting RF structure development for CLARA” was supervised by Prof Graeme Burt.
The examiners were very interested in the portion of Louise’s work that showed evidence and simulation results for low field multipactor in an RF photoinjector that was seeded by field emission occurring earlier in the pulse at a higher field. She will continue this work going forward from her position at ASTeC.
Dr Bianca Veglia a Fellow within the AVA project at the University of Liverpool passed her PhD viva on 21 March 2022. Bianca carried out research into “Beam Stability and Life Time in Low Energy Storage Rings”, where she did comprehensive investigations into low energy electron cooling and associated effects on stored low energy beams.
Bianca developed new simulation tools with the aim of guaranteeing the best possible beam quality from ELENA and for other next generation ultra-low energy antiproton and ion facilities.
She was supervised by by Dr Javier Resta Lopez, Dr Aaron Farricker and Prof Carsten P Welsch (University of Liverpool) and has already started a postdoc position at DESY in Hamburg, Germany.
Dr Gustavo Pérez-Segurana, from Lancaster University, passed his viva on 28th March 2022 with the thesis “Longitudinal Beam Dynamics and Longitudinal Matches in Energy Recovery Linacs”. The thesis, supervised by Dr Peter Williams from ASTeC, explores the “self-consistent longitudinal matches” of multipass Energy Recovery Linacs where the correct bunch lengths and energy spreads are simultaneously satisfied at all points in the machine, whilst still fulfilling the energy recovery criterion. The results have an impact in the design of hgh-energy multipass ERLs for both collider and Free Electron Laser applications.
Gus has now started a CERN fellowship to work on the FCC-hh project.
Congratulations to all!