New Appointment to the John Adams Institute

My name is Richard D’Arcy and I’ve just joined the John Adams Institute as an Associate Professor of Accelerator Physics at the University of Oxford. Prior to this I held the role of Group Leader for Beam-Driven Plasma Accelerators at the DESY Accelerator Laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. During my tenure there I led the FLASHForward facility: a beam-driven plasma accelerator experiment solving the problems currently preventing meaningful application of plasma accelerators to photon science.



At the JAI I will continue this research but with a particular focus on an answering the ‘luminosity question’ of plasma accelerators. This will require exploring and better understanding the science of plasma accelerators in order to boost the number of bunches plasma-wakefield schemes can accelerate per second. My most recent results demonstrate that plasma accelerators can in principle accelerate tens of millions of particle bunches per second, limited by the fundamental process of long-term plasma evolution. My research at the JAI, beginning in June 2023, will concentrate on answering the outstanding questions required to scale up the current experimental state of the art (ten bunches per second) to as close to this fundamental limit as possible.