Alex Picksley, a research scientist in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has received the 2025 Simon van der Meer Early Career Award.
“I am incredibly grateful and feel very privileged to have received the award,” says Picksley. “Seeing the names of the other outstanding early-career scientists who have won this award, whose work I greatly admire, makes me feel humbled and honored.”
Sponsored by the European Network for Novel Accelerators under the European Union project I-FAST, the award honors his “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.” The award recognizes his pioneering research from his Ph.D. work and his work at BELLA and was presented to Picksley at a ceremony during the 7th European Advanced Accelerator Conference, held from September 21 to 27 in Isola d’Elba, Italy.
Picksley was a pioneer in guiding technology development during his PhD at Oxford. His award-winning thesis, “Low-density plasma waveguides for multi-GeV laser Wakefield accelerators,” showed how an auxiliary laser beam can create “plasma channels” to guide high-intensity laser pulses through plasma. These channels are essential parts of next-generation accelerators that use intense laser bursts passing through plasma to generate a moving wave capable of accelerating charged particles at rates up to a thousand times faster than traditional methods.
Experts at the BELLA Center used dual laser beams focused onto a sheet of gas to reach a milestone energy in laser-driven electron acceleration. Four members of the larger team gathered with the device used to create the gas sheet: (l-r) Alexander Picksley, Jeroen van Tilborg, Carlo Benedetti, and Anthony Gonsalves. (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)
In groundbreaking research published in the journal *Physical Review Letters*, Picksley and colleagues from the BELLA Center, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Maryland, accelerated a high-quality electron beam to 10 billion electronvolts over just 30 centimeters. This significant milestone in laser-plasma acceleration, which exceeded the previous achievement by the BELLA team in 2019, was accomplished using a dual-laser system, part of a second beamline at BELLA in 2022. Using the dual-beamline capabilities of the BELLA Petawatt laser, they measured the properties of laser propagation through the channels on a frame-by-frame basis, offering unprecedented insight into how the laser evolves inside the accelerator itself and the nonlinear depletion of laser energy into the plasma wave, says Picksley.
“All of the experimental work we do in this field is team science, so this award truly reflects the two exceptional and supportive teams I have been part of during my career: the Laser-Plasma Accelerators Group at Oxford University and the BELLA team,” he says. “Here at the BELLA Center, we have an incredible team of scientists, engineers, and support staff who collaborate every day to ensure our experiments succeed. I am just one part of that.” In particular, he highlighted the support he has received, first from his Ph.D. supervisors at Oxford University, Simon Hooker and Roman Walczak, and now from BELLA Staff Scientist Anthony Gonsalves.
The 10-GeV electron beams at BELLA are “a triumph of teamwork and Alex’s pioneering research,” says BELLA Director Jens Osterhoff. “The plasma source technology he started developing during his Ph.D. is essential for optimizing the energy and efficiency of laser-plasma accelerators for various applications. This award is a well-deserved recognition of Alex’s dedication and effort. I am proud he is part of our team.”
Currently, the team at BELLA is working on staged acceleration of two multi-GeV laser-plasma accelerators. Building on their successful demonstration of a 10 GeV electron beam, they aim to develop a practical pathway toward the energies needed for a future collider. Achieving efficient accelerator staging, says Picksley, would mark a “critical step forward for the field of advanced accelerators and bring us closer to BELLA’s long-term goal of compact, plasma-based particle colliders.”
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