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From the fall of 2022 to the present moment (the spring of 2023), I have been conducting thesis research on an interactive inflated air pouch with a sticky interior, looking for its purpose and a potential line of discourse to formulate around it. This design research project has opened up my mind to alternative ways to produce knowledge beyond the scientific and engineering research methods, which I was trained to apply prior to enrolling in this degree program. During the development process, I iterated on the interactive structure, the air pouches, as well as numerous versions of secondary artifacts that supported the interactions. Told from my autobiographical perspective of making this thesis, I the concept of drifting in design research and walk the readers through my journey of developing and framing the interactive inflatable structure. The journey is scattered with mind maps and non-linear paths toward key inspirations, related literature background, documentation of the construction, casual and formal reflections, interactions with people who supported me, and self-evaluations. Interweaving different styles to tell the story, I provide a holistic view of my experience learning to conduct design research and focus on revealing the drifts in the journey. Through a detailed evaluation and conversations with students adopting design research for their theses, I propose that this alternative way to document design research could reveal the often hidden drifts in the process, bring readers closer to how knowledge is produced in full reality, and challenge existing norms of disseminating knowledge. There are four major drifts in the propositions along the journey. I call the four resulting framings of my research encounters and provide the associated imaginary abstracts as Forecasts of them in the upcoming Journey

The extremely intense beam generated at FACET-II provides the unique opportunity to investigate the effects of beam-driven GV/m fields in dielectrics exceeding meter-long interaction lengths. The diverse range of phenomena to be explored, such as material response in the terahertz regime, suppression of high-field pulse damping effects, advanced geometry structures, and methods for beam break up (BBU) mitigation, all within a single UHV vacuum vessel, requires flexibility and precision in the experimental layout. We present here details of the experimental design for the dielectric program at FACET-II. Specifically, consideration is given to the alignment of the dielectric structures due to the extreme fields associated with the electron beam, as well as implementation of electron beam and Cherenkov radiation-based diagnostics., Proceedings of the 12th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2021, Campinas, SP, Brazil

Future plasma acceleration experiments at FACET-II will measure betatron radiation in order to provide single-shot non-destructive beam diagnostics. We discuss three models for betatron radiation: a new idealized particle tracking code with Liénard-Wiechert radiation, a Quasi-Static Particle-in-Cell (PIC) code with Liénard-Wiechert radiation, and a full PIC code with radiation computed via a Monte-Carlo QED Method. Predictions of the three models for the E-310 experiment are presented and compared. Finally, we discuss beam parameter reconstruction from the double differential radiation spectrum., Proceedings of the 12th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2021, Campinas, SP, Brazil

The Compton spectrometer under development at UCLA for FACET-II is a versatile tool to analyze gamma-ray spectra in a single shot, in which the energy and angular position of the incoming photons are recorded by observing the momenta and position of Compton scattered electrons. We present methods to reconstruct the primary spectrum from these data via machine learning and the EM Algorithm. A multi-layer fully connected neural network is used to perform the regression task of reconstructing both the double-differential spectrum and the photon energy spectrum incident with zero angular offset. We present the expected performance of these techniques, concentrating on the achievable energy resolution., Proceedings of the 12th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2021, Campinas, SP, Brazil

We present the design of a Compton spectrometer for use at FACET-II. A sextupole is used for magnetic spectral analysis, giving a broad dynamic range (180 keV through 28 MeV) and the capability to capture an energy-angular double-differential spectrum in a single shot. At low gamma energies, below 1 MeV, Compton spectroscopy becomes increasingly challenging as the scattering cross-section becomes more isotropic. To extend the range of the spectrometer down to around 180 keV, we use a 3D-printed tungsten collimator at the detector plane to preferentially select forward-scattered electrons at the Compton edge., Proceedings of the 12th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2021, Campinas, SP, Brazil