Dr Laurence Nix is a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) at Lancaster University, specialising in THz accelerating structures. He has been a lynchpin of the structure simulation efforts and is currently the waveguide structure lead in the THz acceleration group at the Cockcroft Institute (CI), overseeing both design and manufacturing.
A key part of this work involves coordinating with researchers in other groups and institutes. This included a critical publication in collaboration with the University of Manchester, focusing on the design of tapered structures to accelerate sub-relativistic bunches to relativistic energies while ensuring good beam dynamics and RF capture, using traditional accelerator techniques and methods applied to novel accelerators. This work was recently presented as an oral poster at the LINAC2024 conference in Chicago, USA.
Laurence is now focussed on developing robust engineering designs of THz structures to move from rough lab tests to practical structures that can be tuned and with good matching to incoming beams. This has included multiple unique structures developed by Laurence.
Prior to joining Lancaster in 2021, Laurence completed his PhD at CI with the University of Strathclyde, researching Gyro-Klystrons for harmonic cavities in FELs as part of the CompactLight project.
Laurence is a real success story of how our excellent PhD training programme is resulting in high quality, independent and innovative PDRAs.
Dr Rob Apsimon, Lancaster University