Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory located in Upton, Long Island a hamlet of the Town of Brookhaven. It was formally established in 1947 at the site of Camp Upton, a former U.S. Army base. Located approximately 60 miles east of New York City, it is managed by Stony Brook University and Battelle Memorial Institute.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.
A linear particle accelerator is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of oscillating electric potentials along a linear beamline. The principles for such machines were proposed by Gustav Ising in 1924, while the first machine that worked was constructed by Rolf Widerøe in 1928 at the RWTH Aachen University. Linacs have many applications: they generate X-rays and high energy electrons for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy, serve as particle injectors for higher-energy accelerators, and are used directly to achieve the highest kinetic energy for light particles for particle physics.
ISABELLE was a 200+200 GeV proton–proton colliding beam particle accelerator partially built by the United States government at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, before it was cancelled in July, 1983.
A synchrotron is a particular type of cyclic particle accelerator, descended from the cyclotron, in which the accelerating particle beam travels around a fixed closed-loop path. The magnetic field which bends the particle beam into its closed path increases with time during the accelerating process, being synchronized to the increasing kinetic energy of the particles. The synchrotron is one of the first accelerator concepts to enable the construction of large-scale facilities, since bending, beam focusing and acceleration can be separated into different components. The most powerful modern particle accelerators use versions of the synchrotron design. The largest synchrotron-type accelerator, also the largest particle accelerator in the world, is the 27-kilometre-circumference (17 mi) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, built in 2008 by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). It can accelerate beams of protons to an energy of 7 tera electronvolts (TeV or 1012 eV).
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by an international team of researchers, it is the only operating particle collider in the US. By using RHIC to collide ions traveling at relativistic speeds, physicists study the primordial form of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. By colliding spin-polarized protons, the spin structure of the proton is explored.
A free-electron laser (FEL) is a fourth generation light source producing extremely brilliant and short pulses of radiation. An FEL functions much as a laser but employs relativistic electrons as a gain medium instead of using stimulated emission from atomic or molecular excitations. In an FEL, a bunch of electrons passes through a magnetic structure called an undulator or wiggler to generate radiation, which re-interacts with the electrons to make them emit coherently, exponentially increasing its intensity.
The High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, known as KEK, is a Japanese organization whose purpose is to operate the largest particle physics laboratory in Japan, situated in Tsukuba, Ibaraki prefecture. It was established in 1997. The term "KEK" is also used to refer to the laboratory itself, which employs approximately 695 employees. KEK's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics, material science, structural biology, radiation science, computing science, nuclear transmutation and so on. Numerous experiments have been constructed at KEK by the internal and international collaborations that have made use of them. Makoto Kobayashi, emeritus professor at KEK, is known globally for his work on CP-violation, and was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), commonly called Jefferson Lab or JLab, is a US Department of Energy National Laboratory located in Newport News, Virginia.
The Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) is a U.S. Department of Energy scientific user facility at Argonne National Laboratory. ATLAS is the first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions at energies in the vicinity of the Coulomb barrier and is open to scientists from all over the world.
Stochastic cooling is a form of particle beam cooling. It is used in some particle accelerators and storage rings to control the emittance of the particle beams in the machine. This process uses the electrical signals that the individual charged particles generate in a feedback loop to reduce the tendency of individual particles to move away from the other particles in the beam.
Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments (ALICE), or Energy Recovery Linac Prototype (ERLP) is a 35MeV energy recovery linac test facility at Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England. The project was originally conceived as a test bed for the 4th Generation Light Source (4GLS), and consists of:
A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams. Large accelerators are used for fundamental research in particle physics. Accelerators are also used as synchrotron light sources for the study of condensed matter physics. Smaller particle accelerators are used in a wide variety of applications, including particle therapy for oncological purposes, radioisotope production for medical diagnostics, ion implanters for the manufacture of semiconductors, and accelerator mass spectrometers for measurements of rare isotopes such as radiocarbon.
A microwave cavity or radio frequency cavity is a special type of resonator, consisting of a closed metal structure that confines electromagnetic fields in the microwave or RF region of the spectrum. The structure is either hollow or filled with dielectric material. The microwaves bounce back and forth between the walls of the cavity. At the cavity's resonant frequencies they reinforce to form standing waves in the cavity. Therefore, the cavity functions similarly to an organ pipe or sound box in a musical instrument, oscillating preferentially at a series of frequencies, its resonant frequencies. Thus it can act as a bandpass filter, allowing microwaves of a particular frequency to pass while blocking microwaves at nearby frequencies.
An energy recovery linac (ERL) is a type of linear particle accelerator that provides a beam of electrons used to produce x-rays by synchrotron radiation. First proposed in 1965 the idea gained interest since the early 2000s.
A photoinjector is a type of source for intense electron beams which relies on the photoelectric effect. A laser pulse incident onto the cathode of a photoinjector drives electrons out of it, and into the accelerating field of the electron gun. In comparison with the widespread thermionic electron gun, photoinjectors produce electron beams of higher brightness, which means more particles packed into smaller volume of phase space. Photoinjectors serve as the main electron source for single-pass synchrotron light sources, such as free-electron lasers and for ultrafast electron diffraction setups. The first RF photoinjector was developed in 1985 at Los Alamos National Laboratory and used as the source for a free-electron-laser experiment. High-brightness electron beams produced by photoinjectors are used directly or indirectly to probe the molecular, atomic and nuclear structure of matter for fundamental research, as well as material characterization.
Claudio Pellegrini is an Italian/American physics and emeritus professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), known for his pioneering work on X-ray free electron lasers and collective effects in relativistic particle beams.
An electron–ion collider (EIC) is a type of particle accelerator collider designed to collide spin-polarized beams of electrons and ions, in order to study the properties of nuclear matter in detail via deep inelastic scattering. In 2012, a whitepaper was published, proposing the developing and building of an EIC accelerator, and in 2015, the Department of Energy Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) named the construction of an electron–ion collider one of the top priorities for the near future in nuclear physics in the United States.
Sandra Gail Biedron is an American physicist who serves as the Director of Knowledge Transfer for the Center for Bright Beams as well as professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico, where in 2021 she mentors nine graduate students and two post-doctoral researchers. Her research includes developing, controlling, operating, and using laser and particle accelerator systems. She is also Chief Scientist of Element Aero, a consulting and R&D company incorporated in 2002. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013.
James Benjamin Rosenzweig is a experimental plasma physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In the field of plasma wakefield acceleration, he is regarded as the father of the non-linear "blowout" interaction regime, where a laser beam, when fired into a plasma at intense levels, expels electrons from the plasma and creates a spherical structure that can effectively focus and accelerate the plasma.
