Quilt: Susan Jackan Photograph: Cindy Arnold Happy New Year! Perhaps this year will bring a discovery resembling the event being depicted on this bright, bursting-with-energy quilt. Artist Susan Jackan fused and machine-embroidered this quilted depiction of a Higgs event, titled The Heart of the Matter. Stitched and fabric art works of scientific scenes, phenomena and […]
CM2 assembly nearly complete
Fermilab’s CM2, in the final stages of assembly, will come online in the spring.
Fermilab researchers and technicians are currently busy completing the final assembly of CM2, the first US cryomodule in which every one of its eight superconducting cavities meets ILC specifications. As such, it is the material realisation of years of beam testing, cavity manufacturing, and niobium processing. It’s also the first significant tangible step in establishing […]
Illinois Accelerator Research Center
Tevatron tribute
Images: Cindy Arnold, Miles Boone, Reidar Hahn, Marty Murphy On 30 September, LCWS11 was winding down in Granada, Spain. On the other side of the world, the Tevatron shut down after 28 years of operation. Fermilab celebrated the life of the collider with a lab-wide ceremony and party.
From Fermilab Today: Staff and users celebrated the Tevatron’s last beam – Sept. 30
Celebrating the Tevatron
The Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society held a major conference for the field at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island from 9-13 August. A very interesting feature of the meeting was a celebration of the Tevatron, in anticipation of its being turned off later this month. The CERN Large […]
Seeing beneath the surface
X-ray tomography gives subsurface view of accelerator cavities
The power of the CAT scan to find tumours or bone fractures has advanced medical science by bringing such ailments to X-ray light, foregoing the need to cut a body open for diagnosis. As particle accelerator research makes its own advances, scientists are exploiting the X-ray in similar ways. Researchers at the US Department of […]
Good gradients in seconds flat
Fermilab scientists turn their attention to individual cavities to improve beam stability
A constant acceleration gradient along many thousands of particle bunches provides for a particle beam’s sure-footed climb to higher energies, readying the beam for collision by providing the same acceleration for each bunch. But constant gradients don’t come naturally for accelerating cavities, the elements that pave the particles’ ascending path. A cavity has to be […]
Power to the cryomodule
Cryomodule 1 is now firing on all eight cavities. Cryomodule 1, Fermilab’s test cryomodule for ILC-type accelerating cavities and superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) technology, was powered up as a complete, multi-cavity instrument earlier this month. Previously, researchers had delivered power only to the individual cavities inside it. “We’ve operated superconducting cavities before, but this is the […]