Jefferson Lab

Jefferson Lab successfully tested the first niobium-tin alloy cryomodule, a prototype section of particle accelerator, that is capable of accelerating electrons to energies exceeding 10 million electron-Volts.
Senior scientist Grigory Eremeev led the project and a Fermilab team leveraged the lab’s Nb3Sn coating facility, SRF cavity processing and testing infrastructure.

Fermilab gives a sendoff to the final superconducting component for the LCLS-II particle accelerator at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. LCLS-II will be the world’s brightest and fastest X-ray laser. A partnership of particle accelerator technology, materials science, cryogenics and energy science, LCLS-II exemplifies cross-disciplinary collaboration across DOE national laboratories.

The U.S. Department of Energy has given the U.S. High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider Accelerator Upgrade Project approval to move full-speed-ahead in building and delivering components for the HL-LHC, specifically, cutting-edge magnets and accelerator cavities that will enable more rapid-fire collisions at the collider. The collider upgrades will allow physicists to study particles such as the Higgs boson in greater detail and reveal rare new physics phenomena. The U.S. collaborators on the project may now move into production mode.

From Jefferson Lab, Nov. 20, 2020: Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has shipped the final new section of accelerator that it has built for an upgrade of the Linac Coherent Light Source. The section of accelerator, called a cryomodule, has begun a cross-country road trip to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where it will be installed in LCLS-II, the world’s brightest X-ray laser. The upgraded LCLS will boast 37 cryomodules in total. Of those, 18 are from Jefferson Lab (plus three spares), and the rest will come from Fermilab.

Postdoctoral scientist Adi Ashkenazi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has earned the Universities Research Association 2020 Tollestrup Award for her research into neutrinos, ghostly particles that can pass through solid matter at high speeds without slowing. Working with two different experiments, she and her collaborators hope to improve their simulations of neutrino interactions with atomic nuclei.

Three United States DOE national laboratories – SLAC, Fermilab and Jefferson Lab – have partnered to build an advanced particle accelerator that will power the LCLS-II X-ray laser. Thanks to technology developed for nuclear and high-energy physics, the new X-ray laser will produce a nearly continuous wave of electrons and allow scientists to peer more deeply than ever before into the building blocks of life and matter.

From Exascale Computing Project, May 28, 2019: Fermilab scientist Andreas Kronfeld is featured in this piece on the Excascale Computing Project, quantum chromodynamics and lattice QCD. Kronfeld, the principal investigator of ECP’s LatticeQCD project, explains how exascale computing will be essential to extending the work of precision calculations in particle physics to nuclear physics. The calculations are central for interpreting all experiments in particle physics and nuclear physics.

Physicists often find thrifty, ingenious ways to reuse equipment and resources. What do you do about an 800-ton magnet originally used to discover new particles? Send it off on a months-long journey via truck, train and ship halfway across the world to detect oscillating particles called neutrinos, of course. It’s all part of the vast recycling network of the physics community.

From Forbes, Jan. 24, 2018: Fermilab will provide half of SLAC’s LCLS-II cryomodules, and Jefferson Lab in Newport News, Virginia, will provide the other half. Fermilab is located in Illinois, so the very first cryomodule that arrived at SLAC by truck last week made a hefty trip from Illinois to California – essentially making a trip across the whole of the U.S.

A Fermilab team built and tested the first new superconducting accelerator cryomodule for the LCLS-II project, which will be the nation’s only X-ray free-electron laser facility.