Control system middle layers act as a co-ordination and communication bridge between end users, including operators, system experts, scientists, and experimental users, and the low-level control system interface. This article describes a Python package -- Controls Abstraction Towards Acclerator Physics (CATAP) -- which aims to build on previous experience and provide a modern Python-based middle layer with explicit abstraction, YAML-based configuration, and procedural code generation. CATAP provides a structured and coherent interface to a control system, allowing researchers and operators to centralize higher-level control logic and device information. This greatly reduces the amount of code that a user must write to perform a task, and codifies system knowledge that is usually anecdotal. The CATAP design has been deployed at two accelerator facilities, and has been developed to produce a procedurally generated facility-specific middle layer package from configuration files to enable its wider dissemination across other machines.

The Large Hadron electron Collider (LHeC) is designed to move the field of deep inelastic scattering (DIS) to the energy and intensity frontier of particle physics. Exploiting energy recovery technology, it collides a novel, intense electron beam with a proton or ion beam from the High Luminosity--Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The accelerator and interaction region are designed for concurrent electron-proton and proton-proton operation. This report represents an update of the Conceptual Design Report (CDR) of the LHeC, published in 2012. It comprises new results on parton structure of the proton and heavier nuclei, QCD dynamics, electroweak and top-quark physics. It is shown how the LHeC will open a new chapter of nuclear particle physics in extending the accessible kinematic range in lepton-nucleus scattering by several orders of magnitude. Due to enhanced luminosity, large energy and the cleanliness of the hadronic final states, the LHeC has a strong Higgs physics programme and its own discovery potential for new physics. Building on the 2012 CDR, the report represents a detailed updated design of the energy recovery electron linac (ERL) including new lattice, magnet, superconducting radio frequency technology and further components. Challenges of energy recovery are described and the lower energy, high current, 3-turn ERL facility, PERLE at Orsay, is presented which uses the LHeC characteristics serving as a development facility for the design and operation of the LHeC. An updated detector design is presented corresponding to the acceptance, resolution and calibration goals which arise from the Higgs and parton density function physics programmes. The paper also presents novel results on the Future Circular Collider in electron-hadron mode, FCC-eh, which utilises the same ERL technology to further extend the reach of DIS to even higher centre-of-mass energies.

Coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) is vital for developing powerful ultrashort light sources. We introduce a CSR generation mechanism using surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) resonantly excited on a solid, near-critical-density microtube. A high-intensity, circularly polarised laser pulse, propagating along the microtube axis, efficiently couples the cylindrical SPP modes. This process creates azimuthally structured, rotating electromagnetic fields. These rotating fields subsequently confine, modulate, and directly accelerate surface electrons, causing them to emit CSR in the Valilov-Cherenkov angle. We further demonstrate that by improving the azimuthal symmetry, the helical modulation enables CSR emission across all azimuthal directions, significantly enhancing radiation intensity even when full coherence is imperfect. The harmonics can be well isolated for a high charge beam. Our full 3D Particle-in-Cell simulations indicate this scheme can generate X-rays with coherence enhanced by up to two orders of magnitude compared to incoherent emission.

With the recent advances in laser technology, experimental investigation of radiation reaction phenomena is at last becoming a realistic prospect. A pedagogical introduction to electromagnetic radiation reaction is given with the emphasis on matter driven by ultra-intense lasers. Single-particle, multi-particle, classical and quantum aspects are all addressed.

Recent developments for the delivery of proton and ion beam therapy have been significant, and a number of technological solutions now exist for the creation and utilisation of these particles for the treatment of cancer. In this paper we review the historical development of particle accelerators used for external beam radiotherapy and discuss the more recent progress towards more capable and cost-effective sources of particles.

We show experimentally that an effect of motion of ions, observed in a plasma-based accelerator, depends inversely on the plasma ion mass. The effect appears within a single wakefield event and manifests itself as a bunch tail, occurring only when sufficient motion of ions suppresses wakefields. Wakefields are driven resonantly by multiple bunches, and simulation results indicate that the ponderomotive force causes the motion of ions. In this case, the effect is also expected to depend on the amplitude of the wakefields, experimentally confirmed through variations in the drive bunch charge.

Hollow plasma has been introduced into the proton-driven plasma wakefield accelerators to overcome the issue of beam quality degradation caused by the nonlinear transverse wakefields varying in radius and time in uniform plasma. It has been demonstrated in simulations that the electrons can be accelerated to energy frontier with well-preserved beam quality in a long hollow plasma channel. However, this scheme imposes tight requirements on the beam-channel alignment. Otherwise asymmetric transverse wakefields along the axis are induced, which could distort the driving bunch and deteriorate the witness beam quality. In this paper, by means of the 2D cartesian particle-in-cell simulations, we examine the potentially detrimental effects induced by the driving beam-channel offset and initial driver tilt, and then propose and assess the solutions to these driver inaccuracy issues.

Although accelerator technology has matured sufficiently, state-of-the-art X-ray linacs for radiotherapy and cargo-scanning capture merely 30-50% of the electrons from a thermionic cathode, requiring a higher cathode current and leaving uncaptured electrons to cause problems due to back bombardment, shortening of cathode life, etc. Any solution to increase capture should be effective, simple, reliable, compact, and low cost in order to be adopted by industry. To address this, we present the design of a 6 MeV high capture efficiency S-band electron linac that captures 90% of the initial DC beam. This linac does not require any extra parts that would increase the cost as the high efficiency is achieved via a low-field-amplitude in the first bunching cell to decrease the number of backstreaming electrons, to velocity bunch the electron beam, and recapture backstreaming electrons. Under the low field amplitude, any electrons launched at decelerating phases travel backward with low speeds, thus most of them can catch the next RF cycle, and get re-accelerated/recaptured. As the electron speed is low, the cell length is also shorter than existing linacs. Such a short field is achieved by the use of asymmetric cells with differential coupling to the side-coupled cells. Our novel design has implications for all commercial high current thermionic gun linacs for increasing beam current and increasing cathode lifetime.

Shot-to-shot fluctuations in electron beams from laser wakefield accelerators present a significant challenge for applications. Here, we show that instead of using such fluctuating beams directly, employing them to drive a plasma photocathode-based wakefield refinement stage can produce secondary electron beams with greater stability, higher quality, and improved reliability. Our simulation-based analysis reveals that drive beam jitters are compensated by both the insensitivity of beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration, and the decoupled physics of plasma photocathode injection. While beam-driven, dephasing-free plasma wakefield acceleration mitigates energy and energy spread fluctuations, intrinsically synchronized plasma photocathode injection compensates charge and current jitters of incoming electron beams, and provides a simultaneous quality boost. Our findings suggest plasma photocathodes are ideal injectors for hybrid laser-plasma wakefield accelerators, and nurture prospects for demanding applications such as free-electron lasers.

A novel setup allows the Weibel instability and its interplay with the Biermann battery to be probed in laser-driven collisionless plasmas. Ab initio particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of the interaction of short ($\le ps$) intense $(a_0 \ge 1)$ laser-pulses with overdense plasma targets show observable Weibel generated magnetic fields. This field strength surpasses that of the Biermann battery, usually dominant in experiments, as long as the gradient scale length is much larger than the local electron inertial length; this is achievable by carefully setting the appropriate gradients in the front of the target e.g. by tuning the delay between the main laser pulse and the pre-pulse.

In circular particle accelerators, storage rings, or colliders, mitigating beam losses is critical to ensuring optimal performance, particularly for rings that include superconducting magnets. A thorough understanding of beam-halo dynamics is essential for this purpose. This paper presents recent results for the measurement of the nonlinear diffusion process of the beam halo at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The novel approach used in this paper is based on the analytical framework of the Nekhoroshev theorem, which provides a functional form for the diffusion coefficient. By monitoring the beam loss signal during controlled movements of the collimator jaws, we determine the beam losses at equilibrium for various amplitudes and analyze the beam-halo distribution. Post-processing of these measurements provides the nonlinear diffusion coefficient, which is found to be in excellent agreement with the theoretical assumptions. Measurements from an experiment investigating the effectiveness of beam-beam compensation using beam-beam compensation wires also provide a direct assessment of the compensation's effectiveness on beam-tail diffusion.

A study is made of the saturation mechanism of a single superradiant spike of radiation in a Free Electron Laser. A one-dimensional (1D) computer model is developed using the Puffin, un-averaged FEL simulation code, which allows sub-radiation wavelength evolution of both the spike radiation field and the electron dynamics to be modelled until the highly non-linear saturation process of the spike is observed. Animations of the process from the start to the end of the interaction are available. The resultant saturated spike duration is at the sub-wavelength scale and has a broad spectrum. The electrons passing through the spike can both lose and gain energy many times greater than that of the normal non-pulsed FEL interaction. A saturation mechanism is proposed and tested via a simple analysis of the 1D FEL equations. The scaling results of the analysis are seen to be in good agreement with the numerical results. A simple model of three dimensional diffraction effects of the radiation is applied to the results of the 1D simulations. This greatly reduces longer wavelengths of the power spectrum, which are seen to be emitted mainly after the electrons have propagated through the spike, and is seen to be in qualitative agreement with recent experimental results.

We present experimental measurements of the femtosecond time-scale generation of strong magnetic-field fluctuations during the interaction of ultrashort, moderately relativistic laser pulses with solid targets. These fields were probed using low-emittance, highly relativistic electron bunches from a laser wakefield accelerator, and a line-integrated $B$-field of $2.70 \pm 0.39\,\rm kT\,\mu m$ was measured. Three-dimensional, fully relativistic particle-in-cell simulations indicate that such fluctuations originate from a Weibel-type current filamentation instability developing at submicron scales around the irradiated target surface, and that they grow to amplitudes strong enough to broaden the angular distribution of the probe electron bunch a few tens of femtoseconds after the laser pulse maximum. Our results highlight the potential of wakefield-accelerated electron beams for ultrafast probing of relativistic laser-driven phenomena.

An optics-free method is proposed to generate X-ray radiation with spatially variant states of polarization via an afterburner extension to a Free Electron Laser (FEL). Control of the polarization in the transverse plane is obtained through the overlap of different coherent transverse light distributions radiated from a bunched electron beam in two consecutive orthogonally polarised undulators. Different transverse profiles are obtained by emitting at a higher harmonic in one or both of the undulators. This method enables the generation of beams structured in their intensity, phase, and polarization - so-called Poincaré beams - at high powers with tunable wavelengths. Simulations are used to demonstrate the generation of two different classes of light with spatially inhomogeneous polarization - cylindrical vector beams and full Poincaré beams.

The interaction of intense particle bunches with plasma can give rise to plasma wakes capable of sustaining gigavolt-per-metre electric fields, which are orders of magnitude higher than provided by state-of-the-art radio-frequency technology. Plasma wakefields can, therefore, strongly accelerate charged particles and offer the opportunity to reach higher particle energies with smaller and hence more widely available accelerator facilities. However, the luminosity and brilliance demands of high-energy physics and photon science require particle bunches to be accelerated at repetition rates of thousands or even millions per second, which are orders of magnitude higher than demonstrated with plasma-wakefield technology. Here we investigate the upper limit on repetition rates of beam-driven plasma accelerators by measuring the time it takes for the plasma to recover to its initial state after perturbation by a wakefield. The many-nanosecond-level recovery time measured establishes the in-principle attainability of megahertz rates of acceleration in plasmas. The experimental signatures of the perturbation are well described by simulations of a temporally evolving parabolic ion channel, transferring energy from the collapsing wake to the surrounding media. This result establishes that plasma-wakefield modules could be developed as feasible high-repetition-rate energy boosters at current and future particle-physics and photon-science facilities.

We show in experiments that a long, underdense, relativistic proton bunch propagating in plasma undergoes the oblique instability, that we observe as filamentation. We determine a threshold value for the ratio between the bunch transverse size and plasma skin depth for the instability to occur. At the threshold, the outcome of the experiment alternates between filamentation and self-modulation instability (evidenced by longitudinal modulation into microbunches). Time-resolved images of the bunch density distribution reveal that filamentation grows to an observable level late along the bunch, confirming the spatio-temporal nature of the instability. We calculate the amplitude of the magnetic field generated in the plasma by the instability and show that the associated magnetic energy increases with plasma density.

The photon flux resulting from high-energy electron beam interactions with high field systems, such as in the upcoming FACET-II experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, may give deep insight into the electron beam's underlying dynamics at the interaction point. Extraction of this information is an intricate process, however. To demonstrate how to approach this challenge with modern methods, this paper utilizes data from simulated plasma wakefield acceleration-derived betatron radiation experiments and high-field laser-electron-based radiation production to determine reliable methods of reconstructing key beam and interaction properties. For these measurements, recovering the emitted 200 keV to 10 GeV photon energy spectra from two advanced spectrometers now being commissioned requires testing multiple methods to finalize a pipeline from their responses to incident electron beam information. In each case, we compare the performance of: neural networks, which detect patterns between data sets through repeated training; maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), a statistical technique used to determine unknown parameters from the distribution of observed data; and a hybrid approach combining the two. Further, in the case of photons with energies above 30 MeV, we also examine the efficacy of QR decomposition, a matrix decomposition method. The betatron radiation and the high-energy photon cases demonstrate the effectiveness of a hybrid ML-MLE approach, while the high-field electrodynamics interaction and the low-energy photon cases showcased the machine learning (ML) model's efficiency in the presence of noise. As such, while there is utility in all the methods, the ML-MLE hybrid approach proves to be the most generalizable.

This Technical Design Report presents a detailed description of all aspects of the LUXE (Laser Und XFEL Experiment), an experiment that will combine the high-quality and high-energy electron beam of the European XFEL with a high-intensity laser, to explore the uncharted terrain of strong-field quantum electrodynamics characterised by both high energy and high intensity, reaching the Schwinger field and beyond. The further implications for the search of physics beyond the Standard Model are also discussed.

The charmless decays $B^{\pm}\to K^{\pm}\pi^+\pi^-$ and $B^{\pm}\to K^{\pm}K^+K^-$ are reconstructed using data, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fb$^{-1}$, collected by LHCb in 2011. The inclusive charge asymmetries of these modes are measured as $A_{C\!P}(B^{\pm}\to K^{\pm}\pi^+\pi^-) = 0.032 \pm 0.008 \stat \pm 0.004 \syst \pm 0.007 (J\psi K^{\pm})$and$A_{C\!P}(B^{\pm}\to K^{\pm}K^+K^-) = -0.043 \pm 0.009 \stat \pm 0.003 \syst \pm 0.007 (J\psi K^{\pm})$, where the third uncertainty is due to the $C\!P$ asymmetry of the $B^{\pm}\to J\psi K^{\pm}$ reference mode. The significance of $A_{C\!P}(B^{\pm}\to K^{\pm}K^+K^-)$ exceeds three standard deviations and is the first evidence of an inclusive $C\!P$ asymmetry in charmless three-body $B$ decays. In addition to the inclusive $C\!P$ asymmetries, larger asymmetries are observed in localised regions of phase space.