The laboratory collaborates with Diamond Light Source and other synchrotron light sources to develop next-generation control systems for particle accelerators and beamline experiments. Future facilities will produce brighter and more tightly focused X-ray beams, requiring increasingly precise electron-beam stabilisation.
Research questions
Orbit feedback in a synchrotron is a large, fast disturbance-rejection problem: many actuators and measurements must be coordinated at sampling rates above 10 kHz. We study how structure in accelerator models can make advanced control practical, including exploiting cyclic and reflection symmetries, conditioning ill-posed response matrices and designing optimisation algorithms that meet strict real-time limits.
Methods and applications
The work combines model predictive control, numerical optimisation, matrix decompositions and cross-directional control. At beamlines, we also work on low-level control, trajectory generation, online reconstruction and adaptive sampling. The aim is to improve photon-beam stability, reduce experiment times and improve measurement quality while retaining algorithms that can be implemented on the available computing hardware.
