Speaker
Description
The commissioning of the STAR Research Infrastructure (Southern Europe Thomson Back-scattering Source for Applied Research), located at the University of Calabria in southern Italy, is currently in progress. STAR is a compact light source designed to generate monochromatic, tunable, and polarized hard X-ray beams with picosecond pulse duration through inverse Compton scattering (ICS), covering photon energies between 40 and 350 keV for a wide range of scientific and applied research applications.
The STAR 2.0 upgrade project is being developed in collaboration with the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, coordinated by the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati together with the INFN Milan Unit and the LASA Laboratory. The facility will provide high-quality photon beams to two dedicated experimental stations for microtomography studies, served by two independent beam lines.
This work presents the first major milestones achieved during the early commissioning phase, focused on the validation and characterization of the electron beam and high-power laser systems required for X-ray production. During commissioning, a laser-driven electron beam was successfully generated, transported, and characterized, reaching energies up to 150 MeV with charges above 200 pC and a pulse duration of about 5 ps (FWHM). In parallel, a high-energy infrared laser pulse of approximately 500 mJ and 5 ps duration was transported to the interaction point and synchronized with the electron beam with sub-picosecond timing precision.
These achievements demonstrate the successful integration and operation of the main STAR subsystems and represent a key step toward full facility commissioning and the production of high-brightness ICS X-ray beams.
