The 16th International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC’25) was held from 1 – 6 June 2025 at the International Convention Centre and the Taipei World Trade Centre in the bustling metropolis of Taipei, Taiwan. The event was hosted by the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre and attracted 1,000 delegates and about 70 industrial exhibitors from all over the world. The rich scientific programme covered worldwide advancements in state-of-the-art accelerator research and development, gaining insights into new projects, and staying abreast of the latest developments in accelerator facilities globally. Besides, participants had the valuable opportunity to connect with peers and establish new business contacts.
Several members of the Cockcroft Institute contributed to the scientific programme, either in person or by proxy, showing their latest research and developments across novel acceleration schemes, plasma acceleration, data science, medical applications and beam dynamics studies.
PhD students Connor Monaghan (University of Liverpool) and Beatriz Higuera Gonzalez (University of Manchester) attended the conference in person. Connor presented a poster on ‘Characterisation of beam dynamics sensitivity to misalignments in the PERLE injector’. In his poster he characterised the beam dynamics when various types of misalignments are applied to the booster linac. These findings provide an important guide for the subsequent design of the booster linac and alignment procedure.
Beatriz showcased the results of her ‘Simulations study of transverse wakefields in a dielectric wakefield acceleration scheme’. This work is part of the research carried out by the DWA Group at The Cockcroft Institute, where they investigate dielectric wakefields for use in acceleration and beam instrumentation for next-generation accelerators.
Peter McIntosh (STFC) attended as member of the International Organising Committee for IPAC’25 and he also moderated the Accelerator Technology and Sustainability scientific session on Wednesday afternoon. Peter is also the IPAC’26 Organising Committee Chair, which will take place in Deauville, France from 17 – 22 May 2026, for which he received a ceremonial hand-over at the culmination of the conference, from the IPAC’25 Organising Committee Chair Dr. Ming-Chyuan Lin from NSRRC, Taiwan.
Carsten P Welsch (University of Liverpool) chaired the EIC Satellite Meeting at the Taipei International Convention Center. The event, organised by Dr Tatiana Pieloni and Dr Sergei Nagaitsev, brought together around 100 experts to discuss technical developments and foster international collaboration in support of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a flagship facility for unlocking the inner structure of matter. It built up on the EIC Accelerator Collaboration kick-off meeting which Professor Welsch hosted during IPAC’24. This year’s meeting provided a dynamic forum for updates on accelerator R&D and future strategic directions. Professor Welsch said: “The EIC represents one of the most ambitious undertakings in modern accelerator science. Bringing together expertise from around the world is essential to overcoming the challenges ahead and ensuring the success of this groundbreaking project.”
CI director Stewart Boogert (University of Manchester) presented a talk on ‘Design initiatives for a 10 TeV’. There were multiple talks on how to build a high energy physics collider based on advanced acceleration technology, including HALHF and Structure Wakefield acceleration. Prof Boogert reported on the US led 10 TeV collider initiative, an ambitious programme to understand how to push advanced acceleration to reach energies useful for a frontier high energy physics collider. In addition to his talk Prof Boogert presented multiple posters on Beam Delivery Simulation (BDSIM) applied to future colliders.
Andrea Santamaria Garcia (University of Liverpool) presented ‘Reinforcement learning in particle accelerators’. In her talk, she discussed how reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to learn optimal behaviours through interaction with complex environments, making it well-suited for dynamic systems like particle accelerators. She also highlighted that despite RL’s promise in accelerator physics, challenges such as effective problem formulation, training, and deployment remain significant barriers to broader adoption.
Narender Kumar (University of Liverpool) contributed an oral presentation on ‘Supersonic gas curtain-based in-vivo transverse beam profile monitoring for medical accelerators’ where he discussed the beam diagnostics challenges in current and next-generation medical accelerators facilities and presented the supersonic gas curtain-based ionization profile monitor as a promising non-invasive, real-time solution for beam monitoring. This approach aims to improve the patient safety and treatment efficacy. Dr Kumar shared results from successful proof-of –concept measurements carried out at DCF and Birmingham University and outlined a roadmap for further enhancing the performance of the existing monitoring system.
Dr Kumar also contributed to the conference as a member of the JACOW editorial team, assisting the authors of IPAC’25 in producing high-quality conference proceedings. In total the team edited more than 850 proceedings. Later this year, Dr Kumar will lead the editorial work for IBIC 2025, which will be hosted in Liverpool in September 2025.