TUIBCC001
STFC/DL/SRD, Warrington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
The University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom
ISM-CNR, Rome, Italy
STFC/DL/ASTeC, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
MIB, Manchester, United Kingdom
CNR-ISM, Trieste, Italy
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom
The UK has maintained an ambition to build a national FEL facility and this has been reinforced in a recent strategic review*. The Daresbury Laboratory is engaged in research and development programmes to ensure delivery of a high performance UK XFEL and is operating a number of research accelerators to support all aspects of FEL technology. ALICE is an ERL built to develop skills and experience in superconducting RF. It provides mid infrared and THz light from a cavity FEL and a CSR source respectively. From the very start of the ALICE programme a photon science exploitation activity was pursued. In the last few years all funding for ALICE was for biomedical exploitation by a consortium led by the University of Liverpool, which includes clinicians as well as scientists. In this paper we review the work, including investigating the effect of THz radiation on living cells and sub-diffraction chemical imaging of normal and cancerous human tissue by IR microscopy. The stringent demands of these experiments required substantial improvement on the performance of ALICE. Limitations of the current configuration are discussed and schemes for extending its capability are presented.
* www.stfc.ac.uk/files/fel-report-2016/
