QUASAR Group represented at ARIES European Meeting in Budapest
In April, Mark Ibison attended the 2nd Annual Meeting of ARIES, an EU Horizon 2020 organisation which sponsors Accelerator Research and Innovation through a series of work packages.
A wide range of ARIES projects was covered, including outreach and training, budgets, advanced diagnostics, novel acceleration, superconducting RF, materials testing, and medical applications such as gantry design, magnets and Very High Energy Electron (VHEE) therapy.
For the QUASARs, Mark presented progress made by Joe Wolfenden and Milena Vujanovic on the ‘InnoAdo’ project, supported by ARIES Proof-of-Concept funding, which exploits Digital Micro-mirror Devices (DMDs), as shown in the figure below, for optical beam diagnostics. It is aimed at commercialisation of a DMD system, through the D-Beam spin-off company, to enable techniques including high dynamic range imaging and optical phase-space mapping to be used more easily. With lab preparation complete, experiments are now planned on DIAMOND Light Source. Discussion followed the talk on other applications of DMDs, such as for photo-injector laser shaping and quantum efficiency measurement (at SLAC in the U.S.), and the possible offer of beam-time for further studies (at KIT, Karlsruhe).
At the meeting, the successor to ARIES was announced as a ‘New Innovation Pilot Project’, with the themes of ‘Light Sources’, ‘Detectors’ and ‘Accelerators’ each allocated €10M, based on 50% co-funding by institutions. After submissions in August 2019, selection would be completed by October.
Further details may be found at https://indico.cern.ch/event/756346/contributions/.