Overview of the Sidekick Facilities

"Sidekick Facilities" are tabletop mockups of laboratory control and data systems. Our goal is to prototype control systems and digital data pipelines for real-world high-intensity laser facilities. These testbeds are used by researchers exploring the challenges of closed-loop control systems for real-world intense laser experiments. Here's a twelve-minute overview of our project, from LaserNetUS Meeting 2025:

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.

On this website you will find an overview of our project, as well as detailed instructions on setting up your own sidekick facilities from scratch.

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