The Fourth CLARA User meeting was held on 3rd of December 2024 at Daresbury Laboratory with 100 participants attending in person and remotely.
At this meeting, the CLARA team provided an update on the status of the CLARA Phase 2 build and installation. This upgrade of the existing CLARA facility will increase the beam energy by a factor of 5, beam brightness by a factor of 100, repetition rate by a factor of 10, and laser power by greater than a factor of 10. The team presented the status of CLARA, plans for electron beam and high-power laser commissioning, and plans to transition CLARA to an operational user facility along with changes to the beam time allocation process.
Detailed information about the beam parameters and beam line in the Full Energy Beam Exploitation (FEBE) hutch were circulated to users in advance of this meeting and they were invited to present their ideas for ambitious experiments using the upgraded CLARA beam and 120 TW FEBE laser at the meeting. Users were offered a tour of CLARA and FEBE hutch, which was highly appreciated.
Eleven talks were presented by users covering a wide range of topics including: plasma-based acceleration, terahertz frequency structure development, Inverse Compton Scattering, betatron radiation generation, pulse radiolysis, plasma source implementation, and Very High Energy Electrons and FLASH radiotherapy R&D. The talks highlighted the importance of having CLARA as a unique high brightness electron facility with the capability of combining high-brightness electrons and high-energy photons. The CLARA team will update users around May 2025 on the status of beam commissioning and the likely timeline of issuing a user beam time call.
Overall, the meeting was a huge success and clearly indicated enthusiasm and interest from our diverse user community to carry out ambitious experiments using CLARA and FEBE laser in a wide range of disciplines.
James Jones, ASTeC, explaining how CLARA works:
Lewis
Reid, ASTeC explaining combining FEBE laser with CLARA electron beam:
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