Accelerator science powering 'new space race'
The world is gearing up for the biggest physics experiment ever and it will take us 'back to the future' according to Professor Carsten P. Welsch of Liverpool University and the Cockcroft Institute. He is Communications Coordinator for the European Circular Energy-Frontier Collider (EuroCirCol) project, which has attracted 3 M€ of funding to design a successor to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Planning for the LHC started just as the film "Back to the Future" was released and the vision of the future (October 2015) portrayed in Part II of the film has become a reality through accelerator science. This is an area of technology where the universities in the North West excel and where there is growing industry demand for skilled people.
Prof Welsch says: "Accelerator science has enabled the development of a range of technologies that benefit us in everyday life and this has facilitated the development of many industry sectors."
Technologies featured in the film and enabled by accelerator science include: video calls – the Internet was pioneered at CERN and enables the calls that Marty makes; tablet computers – these have been made possible by accelerators used in the development of silicon chips and the miniaturisation of electronics essential for smartphones and tablets; and 3D holograms – 3D 'painting' of tumours was developed for ion beam cancer treatment.
Prof Welsch continues: "Lexus has recently produced a hoverboard which uses magnetic levitation. Very high field magnets are a direct result from accelerator R&D and were developed as part of LHC. EuroCirCol plans to push the boundaries and pave the way for 16 TeV magnets that are not available today."
Prof Welsch, is based in the Cockcroft Institute at Sci-Tech Daresbury which is home to 120 research organisations and high-tech businesses. It is becoming a magnet for inward investment. Prof Welsch explains that designing a successor for LHC is exciting as it offers the potential for the discovery of new materials.
He comments: "By recreating the conditions found close to the beginnings of the universe, the LHC went beyond previously explored energy levels and allowed us to see something never seen before.
"We are now entering a new age of particle physics that will probe the deep structure of space-time and will uncover new phenomena such as new forms of matter."
The LHC used a 27 km circumference accelerator and particle beams colliding at 7-8 TeV to discover the Higgs Boson. After its restart in June the beams now have a combined energy of 13 TeV. With this increased energy, scientists will learn more about the newly discovered boson and explore further into unknown regions of physics.
The LHC took over 25 years to conceive and build so planning has already started for a potential successor, the Future Circular Collider. Proposed as a 100 km tunnel filled with powerful magnets, it aims to collide protons at energies of over 100 TeV. This cannot be achieved with the knowledge that we have today so it is spurring on a new 'space race' to develop new technologies and instrumentation.
Prof Welsch continues: "The European Strategy for Particle Physics has outlined an inspirational goal that will drive the development of a new research infrastructure and focus the minds of the next generation of accelerator scientists on an ambitious target. The EuroCirCol project is literally designing the future – who knows what technologies we will have in a further 25 years."
The European Circular Energy-Frontier Collider (EuroCirCol) project (2015-18) is a conceptual design study for a post-LHC research infrastructure based on an energy-frontier 100 TeV circular hadron collider. The project will receive 3 M€ of funding within the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme. A conceptual design report will be delivered before the end of 2018, in time for the next update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics.
—-ENDS —-
More information:
Media enquiries
Rachel Holdsworth/Anna Masefield, Holdsworth Associates PR
Tel: +44 1954 202789 or email: anna.masefield@holdsworth-associates.co.uk
Background
The Cockcroft Institute is named after John Cockcroft who, with Ernest Walton, gained a Nobel Prize for splitting the atom for the first time in 1932. This was also the year that James Chadwick discovered the neutron and Carl Anderson discovered the positron while working on cosmic rays.
The experiment by Cockcroft and Walton split the nucleus at the heart of the atom with protons that were lower in energy than seemed possible, and achieved this by insights from quantum mechanical tunnelling – a phenomenon new to physics at that time.
Cockcroft realized the immense potential of accelerators in research and in particular for the progression of fundamental physics. He later played an instrumental role in establishing large accelerator laboratories, including CERN in 1954.
The sequence of events that led to the pioneering experiment – the specification of particle beam parameters; the innovation and development of the necessary technologies to create the beams; and the use of the beams to do experiments on a subatomic scale to achieve a deeper understanding of the structure and function of matter – continue today at the Cockcroft Institute and have been repeated many times as high-energy physics has advanced.
The Cockcroft Institute’s role within the EuroCirCol continues this pioneering tradition.
About the Cockcroft Institute: www.cockcroft.ac.uk
The Cockcroft Institute is an international centre of excellence for accelerator science and technology in the UK.
It is a joint venture between the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at the Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. The Institute is located in a purpose-built building on the Sci-Tech Campus adjacent to the Daresbury Laboratory and the Daresbury Innovation Centre.
Prof. Carsten P. Welsch is Head of the Liverpool Accelerator Physics Group at the Cockcroft Institute in Daresbury. He has devised the concept of the training networks and has been leading several pan-European programmes. These are creating Fellows with vital skills in accelerator physics, beam instrumentation technologies, accelerator applications, and laser science.
Provided by The Cockcroft Institute, University of Liverpool
