The Cockcroft Institute is celebrating three recent PhD successes, highlighting the diverse research being undertaken by its students across accelerator physics, beam instrumentation, computational methods and beam dynamics.
Montague (Monty) King, Finlay Gunneberg and Tom Gallagher have all successfully completed their PhD vivas, marking an important milestone in their research careers.
Monty King’s PhD, “Optical Beam Loss Monitors: Instrumentation Development and Advanced Signal Analysis”, focused on the development of advanced techniques for monitoring beam losses in particle accelerators.
Monty was supervised by Professor Carsten P. Welsch and Dr Joseph Wolfenden at the University of Liverpool, together with Dr Belen Salvachua at CERN.
A major part of Monty’s research involved the development and characterisation of a novel oBLM installed at CERN’s Linear Electron Accelerator for Research (CLEAR). His work investigated different methods for extracting timing and beam-loss position information from the measured signals, as well as the influence of changing beam conditions on the performance of the system. He also contributed to the development of software allowing beam losses and their reconstructed positions to be visualised in real time.
Finlay Gunneberg has also successfully passed his PhD viva for his thesis, “A Novel Geometric Formulation of the Vlasov Field and Progress Towards a Moment-Based Particle-In-Cell Code.”
Finlay’s research brought together mathematical physics and computational accelerator modelling in a project comprising two closely connected strands.
The first part was mathematical, reformulating the Vlasov equation on the 8-dimensional tangent bundle rather than in the 7-dimensional time-phase space.
The second part of the research focused on the development of supermacroparticles for Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations.
Finlay was supervised by Jonathan Gratus at Lancaster University.
Tom Gallagher has successfully passed his PhD viva for his research on “Improved Beam Dynamics Through Control of Magnetic Fringe Fields.”
His research focused on understanding how magnetic fringe fields at the ends of multipole magnets affect the movement of particles through an accelerator. These fields can introduce unwanted non-linear effects, which can influence the behaviour and performance of accelerator beams.
Tom was supervised by Professor Andy Wolski at the University of Liverpool and Dr Bruno Muratori at ASTeC.
Congratulations!