Anna Grassellino | |
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 Grassellino in Fermilab with single-cell cavity in 2012 | |
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Anna Grassellino (born 1981) is an Italian and American physicist, Senior Scientist and, since 2020, Director of the SQMS (Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems) Center at Fermilab. In 2017 she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by Barack Obama.
Grassellino is from the Southern city of Marsala in Italy. [1] She attended the Scientific High School of Marsala graduating cum laude. [2] She studied electronic engineering at the University of Pisa, graduating in 2005 with a thesis in microelectronics. [3] She spent the summer of 2004 as an intern at Fermilab and met Nigel Lockyer. [4] She joined the University of Pennsylvania for her graduate studies. [2] For her doctorate, she specialized in superconducting radio frequency technology and applied physics working with Nigel Lockyer. [1] In 2009 she was awarded the top young researcher poster prize at the International Particle Accelerator Conference. [5] She worked in Philadelphia and at TRIUMF in Vancouver, and eventually graduated in 2011.
Grassellino was appointed as a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab in 2012. [6] She was then appointed Scientist in 2015 and Senior Scientist in 2018. Grassellino has covered leadership roles at Fermilab starting from group leader in 2014 to Deputy Division Head in 2016 and Deputy Chief Technology Officer in 2019. [7] Since 2020 she is the Director of the SQMS [8] (Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems) Center at Fermilab. She also currently manages an Associate Professor position at Northwestern University [9] [10] where she is Co-Director of CAPST [11] (Center for Applied Physics and Superconducting Technology).
She is known for her pioneering work in superconducting radio frequency cavities for next generation particle accelerators. [1] [12] As a postdoc, Grassellino experimented with introducing a small amount of nitrogen into the inner surface of the cavities, which are made of niobium and surface treated using electropolishing. [13] [14] She and her group noticed that residual nitrogen remaining in the cavity systematically improved the RF superconductivity response. [4] [15] By baking the niobium SRF cavities at high temperatures in the presence of nitrogen, the Q factors more than tripled; dramatically reducing the cryogenic costs of the large accelerator facilities. [13] [16] She made the discovery of nitrogen doping by accident, hoping to create niobium nitride but instead found with her FNAL group – via material and surface science studies – that the real effect was due to nitrogen as interstitial. [16] Superconducting radio frequency cavities generate high energy with high current and expel magnetic flux, which can result in power dissipation. [17] The technology has been adopted as the standard for SRF cavities and used in laboratories all over the world, as well as private firms. [4] [18] The LCLS-II HE upgrades at SLAC are the first world class accelerator facilities to be built entirely with the nitrogen doping technology. In 2015 she was awarded a $2.5 million Early Career Award from the United States Department of Energy, which allowed her to employ postdocs. [4]
Grassellino has given several international talks, including the keynote talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Innovations in Accelerator Science conference in 2015. [19] In 2016 she hosted Matteo Renzi at Fermilab, who asked her to support him in representing Italians Abroad. [20] [21] [22] [23] She won the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award in 2016, the U.S. Particle Accelerator School's Prize for Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology in 2017, [24] and the 2017 Frank Sacherer Prize for early-career achievement in the accelerator field. [25] [26] She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2017 from Barack Obama. [27] [28] [29] She has given popular science lectures in Italy and America. [30] [31] She is the co-director of the Fermilab and Northwestern Center for Applied Physics and Superconducting Technologies (CAPST). [15] In 2018 she was awarded the highest honour of the Rotary Club of Marsala Lilibeo. [1]
In 2017, Grassellino was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by Barack Obama. [32]
In 2020, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. [33]
In 2022, Grasselino was awarded the 2023 New Horizons Prize in fundamental physics from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. [34]
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
Niobium is a chemical element; it has symbol Nb and atomic number 41. It is a light grey, crystalline, and ductile transition metal. Pure niobium has a Mohs hardness rating similar to pure titanium, and it has similar ductility to iron. Niobium oxidizes in Earth's atmosphere very slowly, hence its application in jewelry as a hypoallergenic alternative to nickel. Niobium is often found in the minerals pyrochlore and columbite, hence the former name "columbium". Its name comes from Greek mythology: Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, the namesake of tantalum. The name reflects the great similarity between the two elements in their physical and chemical properties, which makes them difficult to distinguish.
Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases gradually as its temperature is lowered, even down to near absolute zero, a superconductor has a characteristic critical temperature below which the resistance drops abruptly to zero. An electric current through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.
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. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance (FRA), a joint venture of the University of Chicago, and the Universities Research Association (URA); although in 2023, the Department of Energy (DOE) opened bidding for a new contractor due to concerns about the FRA performance. Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.
The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator in the United States, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, east of Batavia, Illinois, and was the highest energy particle collider until the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was built near Geneva, Switzerland. The Tevatron was a synchrotron that accelerated protons and antiprotons in a 6.28 km (3.90 mi) circumference ring to energies of up to 1 TeV, hence its name. The Tevatron was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and significant upgrade investments were made during its active years of 1983–2011.
Burton Richter was an American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team led by Samuel Ting for which they won Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976. This discovery was part of the November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.
A superconducting magnet is an electromagnet made from coils of superconducting wire. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures during operation. In its superconducting state the wire has no electrical resistance and therefore can conduct much larger electric currents than ordinary wire, creating intense magnetic fields. Superconducting magnets can produce stronger magnetic fields than all but the strongest non-superconducting electromagnets, and large superconducting magnets can be cheaper to operate because no energy is dissipated as heat in the windings. They are used in MRI instruments in hospitals, and in scientific equipment such as NMR spectrometers, mass spectrometers, fusion reactors and particle accelerators. They are also used for levitation, guidance and propulsion in a magnetic levitation (maglev) railway system being constructed in Japan.
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a proposed linear particle accelerator. It is planned to have a collision energy of 500 GeV initially, with the possibility for a later upgrade to 1000 GeV (1 TeV). Although early proposed locations for the ILC were Japan, Europe (CERN) and the USA (Fermilab), the Kitakami highland in the Iwate prefecture of northern Japan has been the focus of ILC design efforts since 2013. The Japanese government is willing to contribute half of the costs, according to the coordinator of study for detectors at the ILC.
Superconductivity is the phenomenon of certain materials exhibiting zero electrical resistance and the expulsion of magnetic fields below a characteristic temperature. The history of superconductivity began with Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes's discovery of superconductivity in mercury in 1911. Since then, many other superconducting materials have been discovered and the theory of superconductivity has been developed. These subjects remain active areas of study in the field of condensed matter physics.
Niobium–titanium (Nb-Ti) is an alloy of niobium and titanium, used industrially as a type II superconductor wire for superconducting magnets, normally as Nb-Ti fibres in an aluminium or copper matrix.
In superconductivity, a type-II superconductor is a superconductor that exhibits an intermediate phase of mixed ordinary and superconducting properties at intermediate temperature and fields above the superconducting phases. It also features the formation of magnetic field vortices with an applied external magnetic field. This occurs above a certain critical field strength Hc1. The vortex density increases with increasing field strength. At a higher critical field Hc2, superconductivity is destroyed. Type-II superconductors do not exhibit a complete Meissner effect.
Niobium nitride is a compound of niobium and nitrogen (nitride) with the chemical formula NbN. At low temperatures NbN becomes a superconductor, and is used in detectors for infrared light.
Nigel Stuart Lockyer is a British-American experimental particle physicist. He is the current director of the Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based ScienceS and Education (CLASSE) as of May 1, 2023. He was the Director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Batavia, Illinois, the leading particle physics laboratory in the United States, from September 2013 to April 2022.
Helen Thom Edwards was an American physicist. She was the lead scientist for the design and construction of the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Superconducting radio frequency (SRF) science and technology involves the application of electrical superconductors to radio frequency devices. The ultra-low electrical resistivity of a superconducting material allows an RF resonator to obtain an extremely high quality factor, Q. For example, it is commonplace for a 1.3 GHz niobium SRF resonant cavity at 1.8 kelvins to obtain a quality factor of Q=5×1010. Such a very high Q resonator stores energy with very low loss and narrow bandwidth. These properties can be exploited for a variety of applications, including the construction of high-performance particle accelerator structures.
Swapan Chattopadhyay CorrFRSE is an Indian American physicist. Chattopadhyay completed his PhD from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1982.
A Rutherford cable is a way of forming a superconducting electrical cable, often used to generate magnetic fields in particle accelerators. The superconducting strands are arranged as a many-stranded helix that has been flattened into a rectangular cable. It can typically only be applied to flexible superconductors that can be drawn into wire such as the niobium-based superconductors used in the Large Hadron Collider. The cable is named after the Rutherford Laboratory where the cable design was developed.
Lucio Rossi is an Italian physicist who is working in the field of superconductivity. He has been working since 2001 at CERN, on leave from the University of Milan, where he directed the Magnets & Superconductors for the LHC project, worth €1.7 billion, half of the machine's entire budget. He was the project leader of the HL-LHC project.
Alvin Virgil Tollestrup was an American high-energy particle physicist best known for his key roles in the development of the superconducting magnets for Fermilab's Tevatron and the formation of CDF.
Vladimir Shiltsev is a Russian-American accelerator physicist and the Distinguished Scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is best known for his works on particle colliders, invention of electron lenses, leadership in operation of the Tevatron Collider Run II, and numerous contributions to accelerator physics and accelerator technology. Shiltsev led the Tevatron collider department and the Fermilab Accelerator Physics Center from 2001 to 2018 and was chair of the American Physical Society's Division of Physics of Beams in 2018.
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