We report on results of irradiation experiments with ring modulators and Mach-Zehnder modulators of our current silicon photonic transmitter chip COTTONTAIL. Ex-situ experiments on ring modulators show a significant degradation from a total ionizing dose of more than 3 MGy and a difference in low and high frequency behavior. Forward bias annealing can mostly restore the pre-irradiation...
The superconducting heavy ion HELmholtz LInear ACcelerator (HELIAC) is designed to meet the needs of the Super Heavy Element (SHE) research and material sciences user programs at GSI in Darmstadt. The beam energy can be varied smoothly between 3.5 and 7.3 MeV/u, with an average current of up to 1 emA and a duty cycle of 100~\%. Recently, the first cryomodule CM1, was commissioned and tested...
CoRDIA (Continuous Readout Digitising Imager Array) is an X-ray imager being developed (as a collaboration between DESY and University of Bonn), for Photon Science experiments at Diffraction-Limited Synchrotron Rings and Continuous-Wave (or long-bursts) Free Electron Lasers.
Its goal is to be capable of continuous operation at 150k frame/s.
It aims at single-photon discrimination at 12keV...
Operating high-gain FELs with ultra-low bunch charges around 1pC or even less enables the generation of ultra-short, coherent pulses with significantly higher brightness, opening the path to explore processes at attosecond timescales [1,2]. Similar requirements exist for next-generation ultrafast electron diffraction (UED), which demands sub-pC bunches and arrival-time monitoring with...
The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the FAIR project is designed to study the properties of strongly interacting matter at high baryon densities, where conditions similar to those in neutron star cores can be created. It will use high-intensity heavy-ion beams from the SIS100 synchrotron to collide nuclei at energies of up to 11 AGeV for heavy ions. The detector system is...
Neutrons are an indispensable tool for science and industry to study the structure and dynamics of matter from the meso to the pico scale and from seconds to femtoseconds. An attractive way to provide urgently needed neutrons in the near future is to build efficient high-current, accelerator-based neutron sources (HiCANS) using pulsed proton beams.
A new national research infrastructure that...
Polarized hadron beams provide a powerful tool for exploring interactions that are unobservable with unpolarized beams, particular for testing symmetry violations. Axions, originally introduced to solve the strong CP problem, are leading dark matter candidates appearing in various Standard Model extensions. At low masses, axion-like particle (ALP) dark matter behaves as a classical field,...
The CBM-STS, a silicon tracker based on double sided silicon microstrip sensors, is currently in full production. 876 detector modules are being assembled and further integrated onto 106 detector ladders which are linear subassemblies of 2 to 10 detector modules. Detector ladders will eventually be further integrated onto half units which will allow to instrument a 25° cone of acceptance with...
The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is designed to investigate the properties of strongly interacting matter at high net-baryon densities. A key component of the CBM experiment is the Silicon Tracking System (STS), which provides high-precision tracking of charged particles produced in heavy-ion collisions. Ensuring the proper...
A new target area is set up at the Helmholtz Institute Jena. One central aspect are combined experiments with the laser systems JETi200 and POLARIS. Additionally, a new dedicated probe laser system, JETi ONE, was installed giving the opportunity to investigate laser-plasma interactions with few-cycle laser pulse ranging from the visible to the mid infrared spectrum. To synchronize these three...
ALCYONE, an EU-funded project under the Horizon Europe program, investigates the impact of prolonged space exposure on biological systems, which is a critical challenge for future long-duration space missions. The project focuses on the development of a miniaturized on-chip micro-incubator to monitor and control environmental conditions for four types of cell cultures. To ensure precise...
We present the Geoff framework for automated accelerator tuning, demonstrated in real-world experiments at GSI. Using classical optimizers like BOBYQA, Geoff enables fast deployment, control room integration, and efficient beam optimization, reducing SIS18 injection losses from 45$\%$ to 15$\%$ and speeding up FRS setup. This work also reports the first application of multi-objective and...
Future Terascale-era experiments require scalable, high-performance data acquisition (DAQ) systems to handle extreme data rates. We present a DAQ solution based on the Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) standard, under development for the Micro-Vertex Detector (MVD) readout chain of the PANDA experiment. This contribution emphasizes the system’s modularity and scalability. A preliminary test card,...
The Silicon Tracking System (STS) for the CBM experiment is designed to handle an interaction rate of 10 MHz. A specialized integration approach, where the readout electronics are located outside the sensitive volume, minimizes the material budget to 2 - 8% 𝑋0 while ensuring high granularity, precision, and timing accuracy. Each detector module features a double-sided silicon strip sensor...
High energy physics has been evolving its software to meet the challenges of future accelerators and ambitious physics challenges, such as the HL-LHC. To encourage and promote a common understanding of the opportunities of future technologies the HEP Software Foundation (HSF) was started as an initiative in 2014. I outline the programme of the HSF and areas where it has been particularly...
Detector performance studies, which emphasise on spatial resolution and detector efficiency, require the generation of an external particle track to probe the detector under testing. The Artificial Retina method provides a set of weights for the cluster centroids, which reproduce the particle track, thus supporting the reconstruction of the particle track. A series of Monte-Carlo simulations...
The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the upcoming Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) aims to explore nuclear matter at extreme baryon densities. To achieve event rates of up to 10⁷ per second for rare probes, it relies on fast, radiation-hard detectors, self-triggered front-ends, free-streaming readout, and online reconstruction. Its main tracking detector, the...
The Laser Ion Generation, Handling and Transport (LIGHT) beamline at GSI forms part of the ATHENA distributed facility, which is primarily concerned with the manipulation of phase space in laser-generated ion beams. In recent years, the LIGHT collaboration has achieved the routine generation and focusing of intense 8 MeV proton bunches with a temporal duration shorter than 1 ns (FWHM).
In...
Ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) allows studying dynamical processes with femtosecond time resolution at the atomic scale. Due to their strong interaction with matter, electrons are particularly suited for the investigation of very thin samples. For such UED experiments DESY in Hamburg has built and is operating the REGAE facility, being currently the only operating UED facility in Europe....
A periodic HTS quadrupole magnet demonstrator for compact beam transport lines has recently been developed and tested at KIT. The magnet is powered by pancake coils wound from 12-mm ReBCO tape and reached an operating current of 1 kA at 4.2 K. To enable stable operation at currents beyond 1 kA, an upgraded mechanical design has been introduced. This includes reinforced clamping, improved...
The Helmholtz AI consultant teams can provide support with their deep expertise in applied AI, tools and software engineering for research projects. Working with our consultants comes at no cost, as collaborations are entirely scientific. Matter research at Helmholtz is a vast and heterogeneous academic field driven by experiment and simulation of unprecedented scale and quality. The Helmholtz...
Facilities equipped with high-energy lasers such as PHELIX at GSI require excellent beam pointing stability for reproducability and relative independence for future experiments. Beam pointing stability has been traditionally achieved using simple proportional–integral–derivative (PID) control which removes the problem of slow drift, but is limited because of the time delay in knowing the...
X-ray spectroscopy at synchrotron light sources has emerged as one of the most powerful tools available for the characterization of the chemical, atomic, and electronic properties of materials. Existing x-ray spectrometers provide either excellent energy resolution at low efficiency or moderate energy resolution at high efficiency. Magnetic microcalorimeters (MMCs) may be a “gamechanger” as...
Achieving inertial fusion energy (IFE) requires laser systems capable of delivering hundreds of high-power, high-repetition-rate beams with exceptional stability. The ALADIN project (Adaptive Laser Architecture for Dynamic INertial fusion) addresses this challenge by developing adaptive laser control technologies that enable reliable, repeatable fuel compression in direct-drive IFE schemes....
Fiber laser systems are reputed for being able to provide emission at high average powers while keeping nearly diffraction-limited beam quality. However, achieving pulsed operation with high energies and peak-powers has traditionally been a challenge due to the small confinement of the light in the fiber causing the onset of nonlinear effects. Parallelization of the amplification process...
The native oxides of niobium cause surface losses during cavity operation arising from two-level systems/defects (TLS). These losses dominate the quality factor at low accelerating gradients (Eacc < 0.1 MV/m). In particular, the amorphous Nb2O5 is identified as a prominent host for the TLS. Nb2O5 dissociates when the material is baked above 200 °C for several hours in vacuum (the so-called...
Right now, high-intensity and high-energy laser systems are pumped by flash lamps or laser diodes. The flash lamps have a very large emission bandwidth (>2000 nm), which makes them inefficient and limits the repetition rate of the laser, while the narrow-bandwidth laser diodes (2-6 nm) remain very expensive (30-50$/W). These characteristics are problematic for the application for laser driven...
Most fragment separators can be operated in two different ion-optical modes: An achromatic mode and a dispersive mode, depending on the user requirements.
This project aims to develop additional optical modes for FAIR’s Super-FRS besides the standard optics, as well as user-specific adaption of the settings to meet requirements in terms of acceptance, transmission, spot-size and purity.
To...
KARA (KArlsruher Reasearch Accelerator) is a 2.5 GeV synchrotron light source. The electrons are accelerated in three stages: the microtron, the booster, and the storage ring. In the booster synchrotron, the position of the electron beam is monitored using Beam Position Monitors (BPMs). These BPMs detect the electromagnetic fields induced by passing bunches. The resulting signals, such as the...
Machine learning (ML) models trained on classical simulations often face challenges when applied directly to experimental data due to significant domain gaps, as simulations cannot fully replicate real-world conditions. We address this issue specifically in neutron and X-ray reflectivity analysis, where determining thin film parameters from reflectivity curves is an inherently ambiguous...
The Adaptive-Gain Integrating Pixel Detector (AGIPD), a megahertz frame-rate, high-dynamic range integrating pixel detector, was developed for photon science experiments at the European X-Ray Free Electron Laser (European XFEL) and tailored to its unique specifications. Two 1-Megapixel AGIPD detector systems have been installed at the European XFEL and are producing numerous scientific...
Since the observation of the radiation hardness of Perovskite-semiconductors compared to traditional semiconductors, the interest in Perovskite solar cells for space applications increased tremendously. First tests on the radiation hardness of Perovskite multi junction solar cells support this. However, further experiments with highly efficient Perovskite tandem and triple cells are...
Depleted Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors are of highest interest at the HL-LHC and beyond for the replacement of the Pixel trackers in the outermost layers of experiments where the requirement on total area and cost effectiveness is much bigger. They aim to provide high granularity and low material budget over large surfaces with ease of integration. Our research focuses on MALTA, a radiation...
PIConGPU is an advanced particle-in-cell simulation code designed to model laser-driven plasma accelerators. With the power of Exascale computing, PIConGPU enables the study of plasma accelerators with unparalleled resolution and physical detail. We will showcase our recent research on laser-driven acceleration of ions and electrons, with a focus on its applications in advanced accelerator...
The Photo Injector Test facility at DESY in Zeuthen (PITZ) is a dedicated test stand for research and development of RF photo-injectors and, in addition, is used to condition and characterize L-band electron guns for European XFEL and FLASH. Recently, a series of measurements were taken at PITZ to optimize the transverse emittance by varying the photo-laser spot size and the gun solenoid...
The BESSY III project aims to develop a fourth-generation light source operating in the soft X-ray regime, providing unprecedented beam stability and brightness. To meet these goals, comprehensive simulation studies are carried out to assess and enhance the robustness and reliability of the storage ring lattice. The robustness analysis enables direct comparison of the BESSY III lattice...
We present a study of a radiation signal in laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators (LPWFA) employing photo cathode injection. While experimentally observed and significant for timing calibration, its underlying physics remains elusive. Using a synthetic optical imaging plugin for PIConGPU we reproduce this signal in simulations for the first time, linking it to plasma structures and cavity...
For maintaining the designed optical performance of the Super-FRS, accurate knowledge of magnetic field quality and element alignment is crucial. Existing beam-based alignment methods can determine quadrupole axes but are experimentally extensive and not practical for routine use. Some cross-talk errors cannot be measured in advance, since, for example, three dipole magnets (or a dipole and a...
FLUTE (Ferninfrarot Linac- Und Test-Experiment) is a compact versatile linear accelerator at KIT. Its main goal is to serve as a platform for a variety of accelerator studies as well as a generation of strong ultra-short THz pulses for photon science. Also, it will be used as an injector for a Very Large Acceptance compact Storage Ring (VLA-cSR) which is being realized at KIT in the framework...
To address new applications in the 20–30 keV photon energy range at the European XFEL, where silicon sensors lose quantum efficiency, the AGIPD consortia has developed an AGIPD detector prototype with high-Z sensor materials. An electron-collecting version of the chip (ecAGIPD) was designed to leverage from the higher mobility and longer lifetime of electrons with respect to holes in the...
The upcoming high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) necessitates the replacement and updating of several sub-detectors within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment. A key challenge of this upgrade is the backend data processing of multiple terabytes of data generated from hundreds of millions of collisions each second. This processing is handled by the L1-Trigger...
Digital twins are increasingly used to support accelerator commissioning and operation. Beyond accurate simulations, much of the effort lies in connecting real-world data streams and control systems with their virtual counterparts. This talk presents recent developments toward flexible, modular architectures that enable seamless exchange between measurement, modeling, and control. Emphasis is...
The characterisation of self-triggering front-end electronics is essential for understanding their timing behaviour, signal fidelity, and stability under high-rate conditions. We focus on the SMX ASIC developed for silicon microstrip detectors, integrating a shaping and discrimination chain with a 5-bit flash ADC and 14-bit signal arrival timing. The chip provides a dynamic range up to ~94 ke...
Magnetic microcalorimeters (MMCs) are energy-dispersive single particle detectors that promise exceptional energy resolution and high quantum efficiency. Their potential has led to growing interest across various disciplines, including basic science, medicine, astrophysics, and materials research. Especially for X-ray spectroscopy at brilliant light sources, precise energy, time, as well as...
When cooling down an ideal superconductor in an ambient magnetic field, the whole field is expelled according to the Meissner effect. In real superconductors, however, the ambient field is partially trapped in the material due to pinning centers like grain boundaries or impurities. This is called trapped magnetic flux. When applying electromagnetic radio-frequency (RF) fields, these trapped...
The KIT cSTART project (compact STorage ring for Accelerator Research and Technology) aims to demonstrate injection and storage of high intensity ultra-short electron bunches into a large acceptance storage ring using the FLUTE linac and a laser plasma accelerator (LPA) as injectors.
Amongst the unique features of the cSTART project is the wide dynamic range of machine and beam parameters...
We present recent developments in applying Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) to electron beam characterization in the COXINEL beamline. Information-retrieval metrics were implemented to evaluate the informativeness of beam diagnostics, enabling quantitative comparison of single versus multiple beam imagers. Tests on both simulated and experimental datasets demonstrated that the SBI framework...
Burst-Mode CoRDIA is a modification to the CoRDIA detector. While
CoRDIA is intended for installation at PETRA IV, Burst-Mode CoRDIA aims
to fulfil the requirements for a 2nd generation camera at the European
XFEL.
The poster shows the modifications necessary, and compares the expected
performance to existing detectors, requirements and an even more advanced
(and expensive) option.
Quantum generative models offer a promising approach for simulating complex phenomena in particle physics. The successful small prototype for calorimeter images with 8 qubits for 8 pixels is the Quantum Angle Generator (QAG), a variational quantum model trained with a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) loss to generate images from the probabilistic outputs of quantum circuits for calorimeter...
The heavy-ion synchrotron SIS100 is (at) the heart of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany. It is designed to accelerate intense beams of heavy highly charged ions up to relativistic velocities and to deliver them to unique physics experiments, such as those planned by the APPA/SPARC collaboration. In order to cool these extreme ion beams, bunched beam...
High time resolution and granularity are becoming more and more important for particle detectors.
Driven by continuous advancement in CMOS Technology, new application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are developed meeting the requirements for the new generations of particle detectors. Monolithic detectors having sensor and frontend electronics on one silicon die are becoming more...
Material and device development crucially depend on in-depth characterization of the electronic and chemical properties of the involved materials and their interfaces. Traditionally, (soft) x-ray spectros-copy techniques are very powerful and well-established tools for probing the electronic and chemical structure. Many instrumental advances have been achieved over the last decades, mostly...
Permanent-Magnet (PM) magnets combine up to zero power consumption with highly stable magnet operation without ripple and cooling vibration effects for more energy-efficient and stable accelerator operation.
As part of the upgrade program BESSYII+, we will install the B2PT dipole triplet as the first PM-based accelerator magnet. It concludes the BESSYII transfer line, transporting the...
Accurate, non-invasive density diagnostics of laser-driven targets are essential for optimizing high-intensity experiments in laser-plasma acceleration (LPA) and inertial-confinement fusion (ICF). We apply a computational X-ray imaging workflow based on single-shot, in-line coherent holography that records diffraction patterns with strong phase contrast and reconstructs spatial phase, and thus...
Laser-plasma acceleration (LPA) is a promising technology for future compact accelerators. However, the low repetition rate (typically few Hz) of today’s high-power laser systems prevents reaching the average power required by applications and hinders the implementation of fast feedback systems to mitigate beam instabilities. To this end, DESY has established a dedicated research program on...
The All oPtical High Energy X-rays (APHEX) experiment at DESY promises to deliver Inverse Compton Scattering (ICS) bright X-ray beams with narrow bandwidth and tunable energy. Such a compact X-ray source is a great alternative to large-scale synchrotron, potentially leading to a number of novel medical and industrial applications. However, all-optical ICS sources are yet to demonstrate...
Cryogenically cooled Yb:YLF lasers provide a promising path toward high-energy, high-average-power laser systems with excellent beam quality and efficiency. At DESY, we are developing next-generation cryogenic Yb:YLF lasers that combine advanced crystal-to-metal bonding, efficient cryogenic cooling, and numerical modeling of gain dynamics and thermal effects. The systems are being scaled to...
Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) have become a cornerstone technology for precision tracking in heavy-ion and nuclear physics experiments. This poster presents an overview of the ITS3 upgrade for ALICE, featuring the world’s first wafer-scale, ultra-thin, and bent MAPS. The stitching process used to produce large-area sensors is introduced, along with the concept of the Monolithic...
In the Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA), electron beams of up to 200 mA are stored with an energy of 2.5 GeV, while injection is performed at 500 MeV. At the injection energy, the beam life time and the injection efficiency depend largely on Touschek scattering. As a counter-measure, the beam size can be enlarged transversally by an exciting modulation, e.g. applied via a strip-line. In...
The THRILL (Technology for High-Repetition-rate Intense Laser Laboratories) project develops technologies for future laser facilities at European Analytical Research Infrastructures (ARIs)[1]. Its main research areas are increasing the repetition rate of high-energy amplifiers, optimizing beam transport and stabilization of large-aperture/high-energy beams, developing large-area optical...
The quality of electron beams generated by laser–wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) has advanced to the point where they can drive novel light sources such as free-electron lasers (FELs), as demonstrated at several facilities. However, electron beam fluctuations remain a major challenge, driven by the nonlinear dynamics of injection, cavity formation, and laser propagation. These challenges become...
For the upcoming high-luminosity LHC, the endcap calorimeters of the CMS experiment will be replaced by the high-granularity calorimeter (HGCAL), a sampling calorimeter using silicon sensors in the front and plastic scintillators read out by SiPMs in the back. After successfully integrating the SiPM-on-Tile sensors with the Serenity back-end hardware, we have conducted detailed
system tests...
X-ray sources are of growing importance as a diagnostic tool for High Energy Density (HED) experiments and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) studies as well as the upcoming FAIR facility in Darmstadt. For these applications, so-called x-ray backlighters must meet requirements regarding low divergence, small source size to achieve a sufficient imaging resolution and high brightness to overcome...
High-power laser systems are used worldwide to study light–matter interactions. However, high-repetition-rate, high-energy laser systems remain scarce because they require large optical components whose cooling presents a major challenge. To address this, an actively cooled Nd:glass slab amplifier with a large aperture (>30 cm) is being developed as part of the THRILL project (Technology for...
Significant energy is used for cooling the accelerator and infrastructure.
To save energy we installed a thermal well system to replace two of
three cooling machines in the future.
