With up to a million X-ray flashes per second, 8,000 times more than its predecessor, it transforms the ability of scientists to explore atomic-scale, ultrafast phenomena that are key to a broad range of applications, from quantum materials to clean-energy technologies and medicine.
From SLAC, August 31, 2022: Fermilab researchers worked with a team of 20 operators and engineers at SLAC on cryogenics to build a helium-refrigeration plant to lower the LCLS-II accelerator to superconducting temperatures. Now, it only takes one and a half hours to make a superconducting particle accelerator at SLAC colder than outer space.
The facility, LCLS-II, will soon sharpen our view of how nature works on ultrasmall, ultrafast scales, impacting everything from quantum devices to clean energy.
Researchers from more than 50 countries collaborate with Fermilab to develop state-of-the-art technologies and solve the mysteries of matter, energy, space and time. Take a look at 10 ways Fermilab and its partners advanced science and technology in 2021.
Accelerator experts at three national labs have advanced the next generation of cryomodules, the building blocks of particle accelerators. A prototype built for the high-energy upgrade of SLAC’s LCLS-II X-ray laser has advanced the state of the art, packing more acceleration into a smaller distance, and could dramatically improve future accelerators.
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.
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.
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 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.