On May 9 in Geneva, the official launch ceremony of the new linear proton accelerator LINAC-4 (LINAC is LINear ACcelerator) will take place. This type of accelerator performs in the ring systems like the LHC an initial dispersal of the particles before they are fed into the “big” ring. Acceleration at the start means better results then – reaching higher energies in the ring.
A new linear accelerator will replace LINAC-2, built about 40 years ago, which accelerates protons to 50 MeV. LINAC-4 should increase this figure to 160 MeV. This doubles the luminosity of the collider, and along with this, increases the speed of the experiments with the help of the LHC.
New accelerator close-up
Important elements of the accelerator are developed, manufactured and assembled by the staff of the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Snezhinsk, together with colleagues from CERN. LINAC-4 (86 m long) consists of four accelerator sections, each of which contains different types of accelerating structures, optimized for the appropriate energy range. Russian scientists developed and assembled the CCDTL section (Cell-Coupled Drift Tube Linac, accelerating the structure with communication cells and drift tubes), where particles are accelerated from 50 to 102 MeV. CCDTL occupies 30% of the length of LINAC-4 and contains seven accelerating modules consisting of 21 accelerating high-frequency resonators with two fly-through tubes in each.
“LINAC-4 is the first stage of a long and ambitious program on the way to new discoveries at the LHC. It is expected that in 10 years, when the modernization program of the Large Hadron Collider is completed, physicists will receive a tenfold increase in the number of collisions of particles, which will enormously expand the possibilities in observing rare processes and searching for still unknown particles, “said Pavel Logachev, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics .
Russian physicists created a new accelerator for the collider
