Dr Alex Picksley, a former DPhil student in Oxford’s Department of Physics and St John’s College (2017–2021), has been awarded the 2025 Simon van der Meer Early Career Award in Novel Accelerators.
The award, presented bi-annually at the European Advanced Accelerator Conference, recognises outstanding early-career contributions to the field of accelerator science. Dr Picksley received the award for pioneering contributions to high-energy laser-plasma accelerators suitable for future applications, including the development of metre-scale plasma channels, novel injection techniques, and single-stage generation of high-quality 10 GeV electron beams.
Now a Research Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s BELLA Center in California, Dr Picksley’s research explores how compact, laser-driven plasma accelerators can produce extremely high-energy electron beams. His doctoral work at Oxford, supervised by Professor Simon Hooker, focused on developing long, low-density plasma waveguides that allow high-power laser pulses to remain focused over metre scales – an essential step toward building the next generation of compact particle accelerators.
The citation notes two contributions during his time in the group at Oxford. Firstly, the development and demonstration long, low density plasma channels suitable for future, compact particle accelerators. Secondly, the demonstration of a new scheme to trap high-quality electron bunches directly into those plasma channels (published in Physical Review Letters in 2023).
His recent paper, 'Matched guiding and controlled injection in dark-current-free, 10-GeV-class, channel-guided laser-plasma accelerators' (Physical Review Letters, 2024), extends this work by demonstrating high-quality electron beams reaching energies above 9 GeV using precisely controlled plasma channels.
'It is very pleasing to see that the hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized (HOFI) channels developed in our group have been adopted by several of the leading groups around the world,' comments Professor Hooker. 'Alex is playing a leading role in the further development and application of HOFI channels to laser-driven accelerator programme at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and this award is well deserved recognition of that and of the work he did as a graduate in Oxford.'
'I am extremely grateful and feel very privileged to have won this award,' adds Dr Picksley. 'It is a reflection of the two exceptional and supportive teams that I have been a part of during my career to-date: the Laser-Plasma Accelerators Group and Oxford University during my DPhil , and my current team at LBNL.'