Overview of the Sidekick Facilities

"Sidekick Facilities" are tabletop mockups of laboratory control and data systems. These testbeds are used by researchers exploring the challenges of closed-loop control systems for real-world intense laser experiments.

Particularly for those with deep hands-on experience running experiments at high-power lasers, interacting with a sidekick facility gives the uncanny feeling of being at the healm of a real high power laser facility. A few reasons for this is that data is delivered at a repetition rate, analog noise in the data is unpredictable, diagnostics are time-gated and multi-modal, and the system is sensitive to physical alignment and vibration. On the small single-board computers are running world-class scientific control data pipelines beyond the cutting-edge of existing digital infrastructure at high power laser facilities.

Our approach in these platforms is to start small, fail fast, and build up. Our goal is to get a head start on addressing challenges of the next generation of control systems for experimental high power laser science.

This work is a collaboration between California State University Channel Islands and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.