Prototyping EPICS Control Systems for Laser Laboratories

Lasers for plasma science experiments traditionally needed extended cooldowns and were limited in how often they could fire. Now, many can fire several times per second! We need something to automate data collection in increasingly high-repetition-rate experiments. Rather than create our own tools, we turned to EPICS as a facility control system with a global research community. EPICS is already being used for complex facilities in high-energy physics and astronomy. Our goal was to explore the practicality of EPICS for all sizes of high-intensity-laser laboratory experiments. We built a small-scale prototype control system in EPICS using a network of Raspberry Pi computers, LEDs, and switches. Our completed documentation allows students and scientists to recreate the system. We took what we learned from the small system and applied it to real scientific equipment in a professional laser laboratory. We are undergraduate students who built our own distributed control system that can be scaled up for real-world laboratories. This will enable facility-wide automation to help high-intensity-laser laboratories run at high-repetition rates.