Prizes for ISIS at the IoP Particle Accelerator and Beams Group annual conference

12 Aug 2025 - Haroon Rafique

Shinji Machida presented his prize talk and industrial placement student Patrycja Jane Broda won Best Poster.

Patrycja (Jane) Broda with her poster prize and supervisor Dr Haroon Rafique Credit: Dr Kay Dewhurst, IOP PABG Committee

The UK accelerator community gather annually at the Institute of Physics (IoP) Particle Accelerator and Beams Group (PABG) conference. Jointly hosted by ISIS, Diamond, and Oxford, this year’s conference brought together over 100 accelerator scientists from UK research, academia, and industry. The conference took place in the University of Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratories, with tours of ISIS, Diamond, and EPAC at RAL. Participants were dazzled by professional magician Chris Webb and danced to Ukelele band The Ukes of Hazard during the conference banquet at the Blavatnik School of Government.

Industrial placement student Patrycja Jane Broda won the poster prize for her work on automation of chopped beam measurement and analysis in the ISIS synchrotron: a significant feat in competition with impressive PhD projects. Jane’s work has resulted in significant time saving. The analysis of a chopped beam measurement is a GUI aided manual task that takes more than ten minutes per dataset, where datasets can be greater than 100 for certain measurements. Thus, a task that took hours of staff time can now be achieved automatically in around three minutes per dataset, enabling fault checking and extraction of additional information which will benefit the accelerator physics group in understanding beam behaviour in the synchrotron.

ISIS accelerator physicist Shinji Machida (right), a world leader in high intensity beam dynamics, received the PABG prize for outstanding professional contributions, and presented his prize talk at the conference this year. Delivering his talk, Shinji presented his career journey in which the attendees were reminded that the ISIS accelerator represented a paradigm shift in the production of neutrons, which served as the template for many international projects including neutron spallation at JPARC (Japanese Proton Accelerator Research Complex). His slides are available online.

ISIS contributed talks included Hannah Wakeling’s report on Communicating high-level environmental sustainability guidelines for large accelerator facilities, Chris Rogers’ work on Muon cooling for a Muon Collider, and Haroon Rafique’s UK activity update from the European Committee for Future Accelerators. Posters were presented by ISIS staff Bryan Jones, Jean Baptiste Lagrange, Patrycja Jane Broda, Kwaku Mintah, Alex Sosa, Shinji Machida, and Hannah Wakeling.

Thanks to the IOP PABG organising committee for an engaging edition of the annual conference, in particular Hayley Cavanagh, David Kelliher, and Alan Letchford of the ISIS Accelerator Physics Group.