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About Me
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Elevator Pitch
Hello, I am Mason Stobbe, a third - year physics major at California Polytechnic State University.
Elevator Pitch
Cal Poly. This summer, I am working on the FACET experiment at SLAC and I will be studying how beams of electrons can be focused using magnetic quadrupoles. This topic is important in the field of Plasma Wakefield acceleration, a technique for accelerating charged particles that can be performed over much shorter distance scales than other commonly used methods which could potentially allow for the creation of shorter, cheaper particle accelerators. Currently, the problem with this technique is that the electron beams coming into the plasma are of poor quality, meaning they have an undesirable interaction with the plasma with the result that the exiting beams are generally too unstable and unfocused to be used in any physical experiment. During the summer I will be creating a simulated model of electron beam focusing through the use of magnetic quadrupoles which will aid in the improvement of this input beam quality and eventually help to create a usable accelerated output beam. I am personally excited about this project as the underlying physical concepts behind electron beam transport and Plasma Wakefield acceleration are very interesting and also because I will have an impact in the creation of new accelerator technology that has the potential to broaden our understanding of particle physics and the universe as a whole. To this project, I will contribute my strong problem-solving skills, my tenacious, goal-oriented attitude, and my knowledge of computational physics, specifically my understanding of different programming languages and how to translate physical concepts and phenomena into a framework where they can be analyzed or simulated computationally. I’d like to thank you for taking the time to get to know a little more about me and before we go, I’m curious to know what you believe to be the most important factor for success in the field of scientific research.
GUI Project
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Summer Project
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Documentation
My GUI project this summer involved looking at the final focusing section of the FACET-2 beamline. I made a Matlab APP that takes an initial LUCRETIA beam object as input and then provides different visualizations of the beam as it travels through this section of the beamline. The magnetic field strengths of the quadrupole magnets can be changed in order to observe the effects on the beam. A sample beam with quadrupole strengths set to produce a focused, symmetric beam is shown:
Summer Project
My summer project involved modelling electron beams as they traveled the course of the FACET-2 beamline, and their potential interactions with plasma in the experimental area in the development of Plasma Wakefield Acceleration. I used Lucretia, a Matlab toolkit, to model the beamline, and FBPIC, a PIC code written in Python, to model the plasma interaction. Specifically, I worked on performing a quadrupole scan of of the magnets in the final focusing section, meaning I changed the field strength of one of the magnets within a certain range to see how this affected the beam entering into and coming out of the plasma. The graphs below show how different quadrupole strengths correspond to different values of emittance, a figure of merit for beam quality.
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Documentation
Rough Documentation (presentation script and resources)Link to Overleaf or other documents