John Adams Institute at Imperial College

The John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science is a centre of excellence in the UK for advanced and novel accelerator technology.

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A plasma channel is formed by an ultra-intense laser pulse in a supersonic gas jet. The pulse drives a laser wakefield accelerator, generating high-energy electrons that are then dispersed by a permanent dipole magnet.

An interferometry image of two colliding blast waves in a gas jet. The blast waves modify the gas density profile to make a thin dense region suitable for ion acceleration.

An intense laser pulse propagating at near the speed of light is here seen driving a non-linear plasma wave in the “bubble regime”, a self-injected electron bunch being accelerated by the fields of this wave appear in a rotated “pi” geometry in this snapshot.

A microtomographic reconstruction of a human femoral bone sample, generated from x-ray images taken at multiple angles with a laser wakefield accelerator.

3 meter long, 2 cm diameter argon plasma source. An arc discharge between the electrodes at the tube extremities heat producing an ionisation rate close to 1.

When a laser is reflected and interacts with itself in a plasma it can form a plasma grating. These have a number of uses, from targets for laser-drive ion acceleration to future optics for ultra-intense lasers.

A plasma formed within a gas cell, when hit by a high intensity laser.

An x-ray image of a fish using x-rays from a betatron source.