Dr Alex Picksley, a former DPhil student in the group 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.
Alex's doctoral work focused on developing hydrodynamic optical-field-ionized (HOFI) plasma channels and applying them to laser-driven plasma accelerators. He is now Research Scientist at the BELLA Centre, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he led recent work to generate ~ 10 GeV electron beams in HOFI channels (see 'Matched guiding and controlled injection in dark-current-free, 10-GeV-class, channel-guided laser-plasma accelerators' (Physical Review Letters, 2024).
Commenting on Alex's award, Simon Hooker said '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.'