Beam Diagnostics – Down Under
Between 13-17 September 2015 beam diagnostics experts from around the world gathered in Melbourne, Australia for the International Beam Instrumentation Conference IBIC. IBIC is an established annual conference series that gathers the world's beam instrumentation community. The conference is dedicated to exploring the physics and engineering challenges of beam diagnostic and measurement techniques for charged particle accelerators and light sources worldwide.
QUASAR Group members Dr. Eduardo Nebot del Busto, Maria Kastriotou, Alexandra Alexandrova and Prof. Carsten P. Welsch all contributed to this conference and presented recent research results. Dr. Nebot del Busto was invited to give a talk about results from measurements at the Australian Synchrotron. His presentation triggered many interesting discussions and showed the enormous potential of optical fibre-based beam loss monitors. This was complemented by a poster presented by Ms Kastriotou who had joined him in several beam times earlier in 2015.
Ms. Alexandrova presented recent results from her studies into the impact of nanoparticle size and material composition on the signal amplitude and quality in laser self-mixing experiments. This non-invasive technique is new in the field of beam characterization and her poster attracted interest from a number of groups. Finally, most recent results from measurements with the gas jet beam profile monitor at the Cockcroft Institute (Hao Zhang, Adam Jeff and Vasilis Tzoganis) and first data from the cryogenic current comparator setup at CERN (PhD project of Miguel Fernandes) were also shown. Prof. Welsch also gave overview presentations about oPAC and LA3NET Fellow achievements to disseminate their R&D results and help them secure future positions.
The conference was attended by 180 delegates from around the world and considered as a big success by the participants. There was ample opportunity for collaboration meetings and detailed discussion of ongoing research. The conference dinner, held in the Melbourne Cricket Ground – the world-famous ‘G’ - was one of many highlights during a research-packed week. IBIC16 will be held in Barcelona, Spain.