Workshop to foster the collaboration of laser institutes on open-source control systems

On 20 December, scientists from the Laserlab-Europe partners Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short-Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI, Berlin) and Helmholtz Institute Jena (HIJ) met together with colleagues from the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA, Munich) in Berlin to foster the collaboration of laser institutes within the TANGO community. The agenda included hardware infrastructure, integration of existing software components, and control-system design.

Laser laboratories hosting TW to PW lasers or driver lasers for secondary sources, e.g. for feeding X-ray experiments, are growing in size and complexity. Controlling, monitoring, logging, and archiving several hundreds of parameters is vital for the success of these setups. Today, several laser institutions already use control systems such as TANGO to benefit from a flexible and well-tested software suite embedded in a large international and diverse community.

"Although many scientists use open-source and community-driven software for their data analysis and simulations on a daily basis, this is usually not the case for experimental control applications”, says Daniel Schick, Research Group Leader “Complex Spin Structures in Time and Space” at MBI, who initiated the event. “During this workshop, we evaluated the applicability of the TANGO control system and Sardana data acquisition suite for laser labs. We were able to identify several collaborative efforts, which will be specifically helpful for laser facilities and hopefully encourage more institutions to join the TANGO ecosystem."

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