​Peter is UKRI Individual Merit Fellow (awarded 2024) and Lead Accelerator Physicist at STFC Daresbury Laboratory.

Peter specialises in the conception, design, simulation and commissioning of electron accelerators; in particular linacs for driving free-electron lasers (FELs). He is a leading expert in the beam dynamics of energy recovery linacs (ERLs), having a decade of experimental experience on Daresbury's ALICE ERL-driven FEL. 

Peter is currently the lead accelerator physicist for UK-XFEL – the next generation, £1Bn scale, coherent X-ray facility. Peter was the lead physics designer for CLARA, the UKs national FEL test facility, now under commissioning at Daresbury. He is a leading proponent of ERLs for FEL based light sources, nuclear physics (US Electron-Ion Collider) and particle physics (PERLE / LHeC / FCC-eh). Peter has served on the European Committee for Future Accelerators Laboratory Directors Group Panel on R&D for Energy Recovery Linacs, producing a roadmap to steer global R&D in the 2020s and beyond.

Peter has been involved design and experimental activities for many international accelerator projects. These include the MAX-IV linac in Lund, Sweden; FERMI@Elettra, Italy; the CERN Large Hadron-Electron Collider and FCC-eh; PERLE at IJCLab, France; and an industrial chip lithography FEL design. 

Peter has an ongoing interest in new applications for high energy, high current electron beams, in particular the industrial and academic opportunities enabled by the production of monoenergetic gamma rays via inverse Compton scattering.

Peter is currently supervising four PhD students:

• Adam Dixon (U. Liverpool) – defining novel bunch compression systems for linac driven FELs, applied to MAX-IV and UK-XFEL. Co-supervisors Andy Wolski (Liverpool) and Tessa Charles (ANSTO Australian Light Source) and Sara Thorin (MAX-IV, Lund University).
• Alex Morris (U. Liverpool) – investigating inverse Compton gamma source design and applications. Co-supervisors Joe Crone (STFC) and Laura Corner (Liverpool).
• Lily Berman (U. Strathclyde) - investigating possible plasma wakefield driven XFEL techniques. Co-supervisors Fahim Habib (Strathclyde) and Bernhard Hidding (U. Dusseldorf)
• William Clampitt (U. Lancaster) – investigating a future ERL based e+e- collider where the electrons and positrons inhabit the same RF bucket, termed the “ghost collider". Co-supervisors Rob Apsimon (Lancaster) and Andrew Hutton (Jefferson Lab).

Peter has previously supervised five PhD students:

• Joe Crone (U. Manchester) – co-supervised with Hywel Owen & Bruno Muratori – graduated 2022, thesis “Design & Optimisation of High Energy Inverse Compton Scattering Sources Driven by Multipass Energy Recovery Linacs", 2022-2024 staff Accelerator Physicist at STFC Daresbury Laboratory, now Physicist at Rapiscan UK.
• Gustavo Perez-Segurana (U. Lancaster) – graduated 2022, thesis “Longitudinal Beam Dynamics and Longitudinal Matches in Energy Recovery Linacs", now CERN Fellow.

• Alex Brynes (U. Liverpool) - graduated 2021, thesis “Microbunching and Coherent Synchrotron Radiation in Linear Free Electron Lasers", 2021-2024 staff Accelerator Physicist at Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, now staff Senior Accelerator Physicist at STFC Daresbury Laboratory.
• Bill Kyle (U. Manchester) - graduated 2019, thesis “Characterisation of Coherent Radiation in Short-Bunch Linac Driven FELs", 2019-2021 postdoc at MAX-IV, Sweden, now Senior Accelerator Physicist at ISIS Neutron Source
• Nathan Woollett - graduated 2015, thesis “A Dark Photon Search by Shining Light Through Walls", University of Lancaster, 2015-2018 postdoc at LBNL, USA, now Senior Quantum Engineer at Rigetti Computing

Peter has also supervised two year-in-industry students; Billy Liggins (progressed to PhD study at Queen Mary University) and Matthew Toplis (progressed to PhD study at UCL) and two postdoctoral researchers; Matti Kalliokoski (progressed to CERN fellow, then researcher at Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia, now researcher at Helsinki Institute of Physics); and Sadiq Setiniyaz (now staff Physicist at Jefferson Lab, USA).

Peter was a committee member of the Institute of Physics Particle Accelerators and Beams group from 2009 – 2020; and was secretary of the group from 2012 – 2016. He was elected Fellow of the IOP in 2020.

Peter currently serves on the STFC Projects Peer Review Panel and the UKRI Ernest Rutherford Fellowship panel.

Peter is author of 39 peer-reviewed journal articles, 89 conference proceedings and 6 accelerator facility conceptual design reports. 

For further details see: 

the epubs page 

and 

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=NLX7StQAAAAJ&hl=en

and

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter_Williams5/research

A graduate of Edinburgh University, Peter completed his PhD in 2003 in theoretical high energy physics at Durham University. He then undertook postdoctoral research at the University of Oklahoma and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States, where he calculated cross sections related to Higgs production at the LHC. Peter joined the ASTeC Accelerator Physics group in June 2006.

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