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Tag archive: accelerator R&D

Spiralling under control

| 11 June 2009 The team developing the ILC's positron source have every reason to be positive. Recent tests have shown both that the four-meter helical undulator prototype – a device that will produce an intense beam of polarised gamma rays – works in its cryomodule, and that the target that will produce the positrons themselves can reach its design rotation speed of 2000 revolutions per minute. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

ILC technology gets awarded

| 16 April 2009 On 23 March, the 2008 Nishikawa Award Ceremony was held in Tokyo, and awards were given to three ILC scientists: Yoshihisa Iwashita (Kyoto University), Hitoshi Hayano (KEK) and Yujiro Tajima (Toshiba Co., Ltd). Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Time to recover

| 31 July 2008 In a linear accelerator, energy conservation is not really on the achievement list. To get up to the required luminosity, accelerator experts have one chance to push the particle beams to their limits, putting much energy into the bunches, correcting, scraping and tweaking them along the way only to smash them into each other and direct the straggly remains into a dump. Not so an Energy Recovery Linac, currently at the design and first prototype stage at Cornell University. The electron beams also get dumped after one run, but before that happens, they are tricked into handing over their energy back to the superconducting machine that accelerated them. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , , , ,

Second sound sounds promising

| 26 June 2008 “Our superconducting technology group here at Cornell is doing some very fundamental R&D,” says Hasan Padamsee, physics professor at Cornell university and expert in superconducting rf technology. “Note that the stress is on the fun in fundamentals.” Students are even allowed to drill holes into cavity prototypes in order to find out what makes certain areas in the material behave differently from others. A new mapping technique, invented by Cornell's Don Hartill, Zach Conway and Eric Smith, could make it possible to locate quenches during cavity tests with just eight (instead of up to 180) thermometers. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

From SLAC Today: Clearing Clouds

9 August 2007 Clouds might be welcome during a drought, but you definitely don't want them in your beam pipes. Researchers around the world are working out how to keep a section of the proposed International Linear Collider—the positron damping ring—clear of electron clouds. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , ,

Crabbing in the cavity

| 12 July 2007 What do superconducting cavities and the beach have in common? KEK accelerator physicists can give you the answer: the crab. During the spring operation period of the KEKB accelerator, scientists successfully achieved effective electron-positron collisions in a new cavity. Called the crab cavity, it tilts each bunch sideways so that the bunches collide head-on at the interaction point. This success will allow the KEKB to boost its luminosity, which is already the world’s highest for a B-factory, to an unprecedented level. Crab cavities will also play an important role in achieving high luminosities at other machines, including the International Linear Collider (ILC), upgrades for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, as well as future synchrotron light sources. Category: Feature | Tagged: , ,

China on the walkway towards the ILC

5 April 2007 The Temple of Heaven, a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design in Beijing symbolises the relationship between earth and heaven - the human society and the universe - which stands at the heart of Chinese cosmology. It was the central image on the poster for the 9th ACFA ILC Physics & Detector Workshop and ILC GDE Meeting in February 2007 at IHEP in Beijing, where the ILC reference design and preliminary cost were officially announced. Although the walkway towards the ILC is as long as that in the Temple of Heaven, China is now taking steady steps and making more contributions to the realisation of the ILC. This interest manifests itself in the Chinese scientists' unanimous support for China's participation in the ILC, which has been demonstrated during the Fragrant Mountain Meeting, held at the end of 2006, the expanding collaboration with KEK and other labs worldwide, the ILC GDE Meeting held in Beijing this February, and the various R&D efforts in progress at IHEP and other institutes. Category: Feature | Tagged: , , , ,

Spotting the Movers and Shakers

| 22 March 2007 Not all vibrations are good. With their 600 nanometres in width and only 6 nanometres in height, the ILC's particle beams could easily be veered off course if parts in the accelerating modules, for example the final focus quadrupole, moved by only a few nanometers. Monitoring and feedback systems will make sure that this doesn't happen, but it's even better to identify weak - moving - points and eliminate them from the very beginning. Category: Around the World | Tagged: , , , ,

ILC Baseline Alternative: The Re-entrant Cavity

| 22 March 2007 ILC R&D on superconducting RF technology is of special importance because it represents our central technology, and it is an area where we are forging the way for future accelerators that will employ this forward-looking technology. Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: , , , , , , ,

ILC Baseline Alternative: The Marx Modulator

| 1 March 2007 The release of the ILC Reference Design was a very important milestone. Yet, we have emphasised that it is really a snapshot of the ILC design. -- By Barry Barish & Ray Larsen Category: Director's Corner | Tagged: , , , ,