Dr. Thorsten Kamps
The physicist works at BESSY on generation and diagnostics of high-brightness electron beams
Accelerators for Charged-Particle Beams play a major role in the scientific career of Thorsten Kamps. Born in 1970, he studied physics at the Technische Universität Dortmund and was soon attracted by experimental particle physics. After the final university examination he pursued a diploma thesis at the research accelerator DELTA. The prospect of working with a like-minded, enthusiastic team on a big and challenging machine was too tempting. He supported the commissioning of the booster synchrotron of DELTA with measurements of the booster ring's beam-optic model.
He then moved on to DESY and Humboldt University of Berlin to join the TTF Free Electron Laser collaboration during the exciting years of first beam and first lasing of the FEL. For the TTF-FEL, he developed a novel type of beam position monitor for the control of the overlap of the electron and photon beams during the FEL interaction.
During his PhD time at DESY, he spent some time at CERN testing prototypes of the beam position monitor. After that he teamed up with the International Linear Collider (ILC) collaboration for a PostDoc at the Royal Holloway University of London. Together with graduate students and colleagues from SLAC, CERN and DESY he worked on the implementation of a laser-wire beam size monitor for sub-micrometer electron beams and finnally tested it at the PETRA storage ring at DESY.
Returning to Berlin he became a staff member at BESSY and was involved in the technical design study for the BESSY FEL. He was responsible for the layout of the electron beam diagnostics and collimation systems. For the SRF injector collaboration, Thorsten and his team successfully built and commissioned a diagnostics beamline, which is now in routine operation at the Forschungszentrum Dresden.
Current Research Topic:
The current focus of his work is to enhance the knowledge on generation and diagnostics of high-brightness electron beams. Such beams are necessary to fulfil the performance promises of the next generation light-sources based on an energy-recovery linac at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin. The outcome of this work will be an electron source which is able to drive this linac with a beam of high brightness and high average current.
Such a development touches many fields of physics and electrical engineering such as lasers, photo-emissive materials, RF power sources, and of course electron beam dynamics. A devoted team of scientists and engineers is currently busy with the development of a superconducting radio-frequency photoelectron source, which is beyond the state-of-the-art and unique in the world.
Contact: Dr. Thorsten Kamps, e-mail, tel.: +49 30 / 6392-5157, www.helmholtz-berlin.de