AD & TD collaborate on first cryomodule for new facility

A technician performs delicate, particulate-free work in a portable clean room abutting the New Muon Lab's first cryomodule.

It is perhaps fitting that the New Muon Lab, a long, low concrete affair facing open fields, sits facing the northern edge of Fermilab's property. The hangar-sized building is a busy place these days, home to the laboratory's Superconducting Radio Frequency Test Facility, and bustling with the work that keeps Fermilab pushing the boundary of high-energy particle physics research.

Crews from the laboratory's Accelerator Division and Technical Division recently wrapped up a month-long collaboration at NML on a beamline vacuum system for the facility's first cryomodule, the technology for future particle accelerators such as Project X and the ILC.

Hidden inside a labyrinthine series of concrete walls six feet thick, the hulking, marigold-yellow tube holds eight SRF cavities-the mechanisms that accelerate particle beams to powerful energies. To do the job, those cavities must be scrupulously clean. A simple dust speck can spell disaster.

Accelerator Division's Jerry Leibfritz, the SRF Test Facility project leader, said that presented a serious challenge for the technicians installing the cavity string vacuum system.

"Every connection-every last nut and bolt-had to be cleaned with a pure-nitrogen air gun until it was particulate free," he said. The laboratory had to build portable clean rooms around the cryomodule. It took five men a full four weeks, regularly working overtime and weekends, to get the vacuum system in place.

-- Andrea Mustain

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State-of-the-art LHC virtual control rooms allow full participation from US

From Scientific Computing,
March 31, 2010

On March 30, 2010, the world's most powerful particle accelerator began slamming subatomic particles together at record energies and recording the consequences of the micro-explosions that result, opening a new chapter in scientists' efforts to answer some of the most fundamental questions in physics. Vanderbilt physicists are playing an important role in this international experiment, one that could significantly alter our basic understanding of the world we live in. The giant machine, called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was constructed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and is located in Switzerland.

Research Assistant Professor William Gabella is working full time at CERN. Six other Vanderbilt researchers - Professors Victoria Greene, Charles Maguire and Paul Sheldon, Associate Professors Will Johns and Julia Velkovska, and Professor Emeritus Medford Webster - are participating virtually, either through facilities at the Fermi National Laboratory or through a state-of-the-art control center that the group has set up in the physics building on campus with the support of the College of Arts & Science.

The new center will allow the physicists and their students to participate more fully in the experiment. "In the past, you couldn't fully participate in an experiment unless you were on site. Remote sites like ours represent the globalization of big science experiments," Sheldon said.

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