The latest ATAP Newsletter highlights new research that improves existing particle accelerators and advances next-generation laser-based accelerators and their applications. It also features how our researchers use digital twins and artificial intelligence to enhance accelerator performance, recent developments in real-time distributed fiber sensors, a new method for designing improved quantum circuits, and a snapshot of how ATAP researchers harness the power and versatility of particle accelerators and their applications to support breakthroughs in quantum technologies.
Researchers from our BELLA Center and their collaborators from TAU Systems have demonstrated unprecedented eight hours of continuous operation of a free-electron laser (FEL) driven by a laser-plasma accelerator without operator intervention. This significant milestone marks progress toward the development of plasma accelerators for real-world applications, including compact X-ray FELs and high-performance electron injectors for current scientific research facilities, supporting advancements in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, and many other fields.
Currently, aligning the beamline in an accelerator is a time-consuming process that can often take hours each day on small systems and even longer on larger ones. Researchers from our Advanced Modeling Program have now developed a digital twin of a particle accelerator beamline to improve this process. The work, which combines high-fidelity simulations, machine learning, and the computing power of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab, modeled BELLA’s hundred-terawatt undulator facility to develop an automated method broadly applicable to control other accelerators and complex systems.
A collaboration between our Berkeley Accelerator Controls & Instrumentation Program and the Lab’s Energy Geosciences Division has demonstrated a flexible platform for real-time distributed fiber sensing. The open-source platform, which enables future development by the broader research community, provides reliable, precise sensors for use in structurally dynamic environments, such as those in superconducting magnets used in particle accelerators and colliders.
Advancing the development of scalable quantum computing, our Advanced Light Source Accelerator Physics Program has developed a novel approach to reduce errors caused by external forces in quantum circuits. The technique uses standard classical gradient descent to simultaneously discover circuit structure and optimize gate parameters, and can autonomously adapt to hardware noise and failures, improving the fidelity of quantum circuits.
Building on decades of experience in particle accelerator technology, ATAP researchers and their collaborators are applying this expertise and specialized infrastructure—including high-powered petawatt lasers, neutralized drift-compression ion beams, and advanced radio-frequency control electronics—to develop color-center qubits and cutting-edge technologies for controlling and reading the quantum states of superconducting qubits, helping usher in the quantum era.
Written by Carl A. Williams or other authors as credited.
For more information on ATAP News articles, contact caw@lbl.gov.
