Jeroen van Tilborg, a senior scientist and deputy director for experiments at the BELLA Center in the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in October 2025.
The society’s Council of Representatives recognized van Tilborg “For pioneering work on compact laser-plasma accelerators, advancing innovative high-resolution diagnostics, and for the creation of novel particle and light sources empowered by plasma accelerator technology.”
Becoming an APS Fellow “means a lot more than I had originally anticipated,” says van Tilborg. “I’m extremely appreciative of being recognized by the particle accelerator community, and the award offered a moment of reflection, energizing me to tackle the next set of challenges.”
The award, he adds, “is a recognition of the BELLA team. Accelerator science is team science, and no project I have worked on has not involved multiple years of R&D with teams consisting of multiple researchers, as well as operational, safety, and administrative support staff.”
Tackling important scientific and engineering questions year after year, notes van Tilborg, “requires a lot of mental motivation and endurance. Team members come and go, the funding landscape shifts, and collaborations naturally develop. It’s a dynamic cycle, in an exciting way, because it means our work is never repetitive.”
For nearly 25 years, he has worked to advance the development of laser plasma accelerators (LPAs), which he says, “Represent incredibly high-tech, exciting, and indispensable tools that can shape our society,” supporting progress in areas ranging from elementary particle physics, microelectronics, cancer therapy, security, critical mineral sensing, lithography, and beyond.
Van Tilborg says that his current research focuses on four main areas: lasers, accelerators, diagnostics, and applications. Working with femtosecond lasers at the advanced BELLA Center laser facilities, his research employs these lasers to drive LPAs and generate ultrafast diagnostics for the particle beams and radiation pulses they produce. “The creation and analysis of coherent transition radiation by femtosecond electron beams was a highlight that enabled probing these beams with femtosecond and micrometer precision.”
On the accelerator side, he is collaborating with world-renowned researchers on plasma channel generation and characterization, using these techniques to develop a compact, centimeter-scale, multi-GeV accelerator module. This, he says, is a “critical innovation that our whole group and plasma accelerator community thrives on, and where my colleagues and I have made significant contributions over the years.”
Last year, the BELLA team achieved a major milestone in developing LPAs by accelerating a high-quality electron beam to 10 GeV in just 30 centimeters, marking a significant improvement in energy conversion and beam quality over previous efforts.
“Implementing diagnostics on the laser pulses, plasma profile, electron beam, and radiation bursts allowed us to gain deeper insights, which in turn spurred new control methods (active plasma lenses, for example) and active stabilization techniques to be developed,” explains van Tilborg.
The multi-disciplinary nature of this work, which combines scientific and engineering expertise from across Berkeley Lab and aims to connect novel, compact particle accelerators to real-world applications, “has been the driving force behind my work,” he says.
This work involves developing ultra-low emittance electron beams for particle physics research, muons for deep-penetrating tomography, protons for cancer treatment, focused electron bunches for microelectronics resilience testing, high-charge beams for isotope manipulation, free-electron laser radiation to enable single-shot imaging, and EUV light sources, along with gamma rays for nuclear inspection.
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