PhD Success!

Despite the mayhem of the current lockdown, Oxford DPhil student, Chetan Gohil, has successfully submitted and defended his thesis. A member of the JAI since 2016, Chet's work of the past few years has been to characterise dynamic imperfections in the Compact Linear Collider, CLIC, a proposed TeV-scale electron-positron collider under development at CERN.

In order to achieve a high luminosity the CLIC project is targeting ultra-small beam sizes at the collision point. This makes CLIC sensitive to the impact of imperfections, which degrade the quality of the beam and lower the luminosity. His thesis looks at the impact of dynamic imperfections, such as ground motion and stray magnetic fields on the beam. He characterised these imperfections through measurements at live accelerator facilities, such as inside the LHC tunnel, and developed a model that can be used in simulations. Using this model, he simulated the impact of dynamic imperfections on CLIC and was able to evaluate the effectiveness of different mitigation techniques.

Following his succesful defence, Chet will be working in a post doctoral position at the University of Oxford working on machine learning.