QUASAR member Sara Morales Vigo completes PhD
QUASAR Group member Sara Morales Vigo has successfully completed her PhD.
She joined the QUASAR Group in September 2020 through a programme shared between the University of Liverpool / Cockcroft Institute and CERN, where she was based.
Her work on ‘Improvement of Accelerator Diagnostics via the Development of Beam Loss Calibration and Pattern Recognition Algorithms for the Large Hadron Collider Beam Loss Instrumentation Detectors’, was supervised by Prof Carsten P Welsch and Dr Joseph Wolfenden (University of Liverpool), as well as Dr Belén María Salvachua Ferrando (CERN).
Sara’s project demonstrated how the LHC’s Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system, originally designed purely to protect the accelerator from damaging beam losses, can also serve as a powerful diagnostic tool for understanding beam behaviour. By analyzing beam-loss tests and developing new calibration techniques for the LHC’s ionization chambers and fast diamond detectors, her work made it possible to identify where, how, and why particles are lost around the 27 km accelerator ring. The improved calibration techniques that Sara developed now help distinguish harmless, unavoidable loss patterns from those signalling hardware issues or sub-optimal machine settings.
Sara commented: " It has been a pleasure working on this exciting topic in the QUASAR Group over the years, and I look forward to our continuing collaboration."