October 2018: In the Village machine shop, an IOTA sextupole magnet awaits its sixth curve to complete its precise aperture. The wire is one hundredth of one inch in diameter.
accelerator technology
The Illinois Accelerator Research Center, called IARC, is changing its name to IARC at Fermilab. Your first question may be, “Why?”
Fermilab scientists have broken their own world record for an accelerator magnet. In June, their demonstrator steering dipole magnet achieved a 14.5-tesla field, surpassing the field strength of their 14.1-tesla magnet, which set a record in 2019. This magnet test shows that scientists and engineers can address the demanding requirements for a future particle collider under discussion in the particle physics community.
From Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, June 17, 2020: While COVID-19 risks had led to a temporary halt in fabrication work on high-power superconducting magnets built by a collaboration of three national labs for an upgrade of the world’s largest particle collider at CERN in Europe, researchers at Berkeley Lab are still carrying out some project tasks. Fermilab scientist Giorgio Apollinari, head of the U.S.-based magnet effort for the HL-LHC, is quoted in this piece.
This is PIP-II’s very first low-beta 650-MHz cavity, which arrived at Fermilab on May 21. It is a present from the Italian institution INFN and was made by E. Zanon.
A visit to the Applied Physics and Superconducting Technology Division shows activity.
Fermilab is currently upgrading its accelerator complex to produce the world’s most powerful beam of high-energy neutrinos. To generate these particles, the accelerators will send an intense beam of protons traveling near the speed of light through a maze of particle accelerator components before passing through metallic “windows” and colliding with a stationary target. Researchers are testing the endurance of windows made of a titanium alloy, exposing samples to high-intensity proton beams to see how well the material will perform.
Sujit Bidhar contacted OPTT in 2017 about a compact, low-power nanofiber electrospinner he was developing to produce targets for high-intensity particle beams. OPTT filed a provisional patent application in February 2018. The technology is currently patent-pending.
From Semiconductor Engineering, April 6, 2020: Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have built an enormous superconducting magnet — one of 16 — that will be used in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator project at CERN in Europe.
From Physics Today, April 1, 2020: Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev provides a rundown of the advances that the particle accelerator community has made in increasing beam energy, power, luminosity and brilliance and summarizes the breakthroughs and discoveries that lie ahead for the field of beam physics.