I am a Research Fellow working with the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, at Imperial College London. I received my PhD from Imperial in 2013, was was previously a postdoc at Imperial, JSPS Fellowship (2015-2017) and QST Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017-2020) at Kansai Photon Science Institute, Japan), and a holder of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at ICL (2020-2023).  My research includes exploring the physics of laser plasma interactions, particle acceleration, high energy density plasmas, and fusion.  

High energy density physics & fusion:

High energy density physics (HEDP) is the study of matter under extreme conditions where the energy density exceeds about 100 GJ/m³.  Understanding the behaviour of matter in this regime can improve our understanding of conditions in stellar interiors, supernovae, and planetary cores.  In the laboratory, we can use high power lasers to generate these conditons and understand how to control them. 

One key application of HEDP is fusion power.  I am a member of the UPLiFT project (https://www.clf.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/Uplift-Project.aspx), looking at building UK capability in inertial confinement fusion.  One of my main goals is to investigate novel ways to detect fusion neutrons and use them to infer properties of burning plasmas.  

Laser driven particle acceleration:

Although still in their infancy, high-power-laser driven ion accelerators are an alternative to conventional accelerators, providing beams with novel properties and resulting in new applications. A high-power-laser is focused onto a target, ionising atoms and heating freed electrons, which stream away from the laser focus. As the target ions remain relatively static due to a significantly lower charge-to-mass ratio, a charge imbalance is created, generating an extreme electrostatic field, accelerating ions to >MeV energies in ~μm distances.

Although low laser repetition rate limits the average current, the extremely high peak current at source is of kiloampere order. This motivates a number of applications distinct from conventional ion sources, such as radiography of high energy density physics experiments, generation of warm dense matter, ultrafast material response studies, material processing, high dose radiobiology and as high energy, high peak current injectors into a conventional accelerator.

I'm a member of LhARA - the Laser-hybrid Accelerator for Radiological Applications (https://ccap.hep.ph.ic.ac.uk/trac/wiki/Research/LhARA), for which I serve as a Work Package Manager for the laser driven ion source. Together with colleagues at Strathclyde, Queen's University Belfast and the Central Laser Facility, we are working on developing a high repetition rate and stable laser driven ion source for the project. The ions we generate will be transported using the LhARA beamline to serve researchers investigating the radiobiological response of irradiated cell and animal models.