About Me
My name is Travis Nichols and I am an undergraduate physics major and math minor from California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo, interested in lasers, plasmas, and accelerator physics. I am an experimentalist to my core, and I love being in the lab, pressing buttons, flipping switches, and turning knobs. There is something I find uniquely satisfying about the troubleshooting process of experimental physics, and being at SLAC was a wonderful opportunity for me to gain valuable experience and confirm my passion for this field. I was fortunate enough to be an intern at SLAC in the summer of 2023 where I worked primarily with Robert Ariniello and Spencer Gessner on alignment diagnostics and characterizations for the lithium Ionizing Bessel laser used in sector 20 of the linac for PWFA experiments.
Contact Information
Primary Email: tnicho02@calpoly.edu | Phone Number: (818)281-7723
Please feel free to reach out to me for questions or if my GUI starts bugging out
Background For My Project
At FACET-II we focus a laser pulse onto an oven of lithium gas to create the plasmas used in PWFA. Lithium is great because its first ionization state is relatively easy to reach, needing only 5.4eV, but the second ionization state is very difficult to reach, needing 75.6eV. This makes it easy to create a uniformly ionized plasma medium where all the lithium is singly ionized, but none of it is doubly ionized. The challenge comes from making these plasmas on a meter scale, requiring a uniform but high-intensity laser pulse, which can be quite difficult to create. Through chirped pulse amplification we can create a 10TW Ti:Sapphire laser in the Sector 20 laser room. To make the laser pulse uniform in intensity, we pass it through a masked axicon lens, creating a non-diffractive Bessel beam. This uniform high-intensity laser pulse will allow us to create long-length plasmas, but only if the laser is behaving as intended; my project was to develop alignment diagnostics and characterization systems to ensure the Bessel beam is forming as desired.
Laser Alignment GUI
Rail Camera
Downstream Holed Mirrors (Near and Far)
