Congratulations to Lulu Russell, a graduate student at the BELLA Center in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division at Berkeley Lab, who received an award for a “lightning” talk based on their poster at the 2026 LaserNetUS meeting in Rochester, New York, July 13-15. LaserNetUS, established in 2018, is a network of user facilities across the U.S. and Canada that provides researchers with access to the most powerful lasers in North America. The BELLA Center has been a partner since the start.
“The lightning talk award was for a 90-second, two-slide talk I gave based on the poster I presented at the conference, and I was grateful for the recognition of the work we put into the research,” says Russell. “I enjoyed the lightning talk format as a way to get a little more practice presenting my research to the broader research community.”
Russell’s talk, based on the poster titled “3D Imaging of Low-Density Foam Targets for Ion Acceleration with Ptychographic Laminography,” focused on research conducted primarily with BELLA Research Scientist Lieselotte Obst-Huebl and collaborators at Brigham Young University in Utah and at Argonne National Lab in Illinois. The work used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne to capture 3D images of ion-acceleration targets on the Interaction Point 2 beamlines of BELLA’s Petawatt laser system.
Russell says, “Characterizing these targets will enable us to improve simulations and deepen our understanding of our acceleration experiments.”
The work has many potential applications, including in radiobiology research, where improved ion-accelerator sources could enable next-generation proton therapies for cancer treatment.
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