2024 EPS Plasma Physics Division PhD Research Award for Lucas Rovige

We warmly congratulate Lucas Rovige, who defended his PhD thesis “Optimization, stabilization and optical phase control of a high-repetition rate laser-wakefield accelerator” in 2022, and has been awarded this year’s PhD research award by the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS).

His work, done in the APPLI group under the direction of Jérôme Faure, and in close collaboration with the PCO group, used the near-single-cycle laser pulses of Salle Noire 2 to generate MeV electrons at a kHz repetition rate, with the characteristics and flux required for radiation-biology experiments.

Highlights of his thesis work are an impressive demonstrated electron-beam stability over millions of consecutive laser shots during hours, the first carrier-envelope phase effects influencing the electron beam pointing, and the first experiment measuring the survival rate of cancerous cells irradiated with a 1 Gy/s dose rate. Underlying these results is solid work to optimize a helium gas jet through fluid simulations and the laser irradiance via self-focusing through kinetic modelling to achieve eventually a beam divergence as low as 3 mrad and electron energies up to 8 MeV.

Lucas is now a postdoc at UCLA and studies astro-physically relevant plasmas in the laboratory.