Fine-tuning the instruments of acceleration

Some members of the automatic cavity tuning machine international collaboration. Front row, from left: Ruben Carcagno, Fermilab; Toshio Sishido, Hotishi Hayano and Ken Watanabe, KEK. Back row, from left: Guennadi Kreps, DESY; Roger Nehring, Sergey Kotelnikov, Dileep Bhogadi, Andrzej Makulski, Bill Mumper and Jerzy Nogiec, Fermilab; Jan-Hendrik Thie, DESY; Cosmore Sylvester, Fermilab; Alessandro Quadrelli, University of Pisa student; Fred Lewis and Warren Schappert, Fermilab.

Achieving resonance in a scientific collaboration is no small feat, but scientists at Fermilab, DESY and KEK have come together to do exactly that: they've improved the mechanism that keeps superconducting radio frequency cavities in tune.

Members of Fermilab's Technical Division and DESY staff, with financial assistance from KEK, recently built four new tuning machines that set SRF cavities to the correct frequency and alignment. More highly automated than their predecessors, the machines save time and labor and ensure greater consistency in RF cavity quality. They do this by squeezing or stretching individual cells in a nine-cell cavity, allowing all of them to perform identically and impart the same acceleration to the beam.

"Now we don't need RF experts to tune them one by one," said Technical Division Head Giorgio Apollinari. "We can put them in a machine, push a button, and let it run."

The teams engineered the new machines with DESY's future X-ray Free-Electron Laser in mind, as well as the proposed Project X and International Linear Collider. If scientists were to build the ILC, it would need 18,000 SRF cavities, all of which would require tuning.

"You cannot conceive of doing this by hand," Apollinari said.

Under the technical direction of electrical engineer Andrzej Makulski and software architect Jerzy Nogiec, Fermilab TD staff developed a complete set of control electronics and control software for the tuning machines. In Germany, DESY staff developed the mechanical assembly and electrical devices.

Read more

-- Leah Hesla

A look inside the labs

Editor's note: This blog was written by DOE Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman about his tours to Fermilab and Argonne. Watch the all-hands talk that Poneman gave at Fermilab.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab - two of the Department's national laboratories that are renowned for their cutting-edge research. There I obtained a firsthand look at some of the most innovative projects in the world of science and technology. The origins of these labs go back to the University of Chicago and the ground-breaking work of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi in the Manhattan Project, including the successful production of the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. My visit persuaded me that we can expect more transformational breakthroughs from these labs in the years to come.

Read more

Einstein, Bohr, and ultimate reality

From 13.7 Cosmos and Culture,
an NPR blog, Aug. 24, 2010

How much can we know of the world? Some believe we can go all the way and find the answers to the most penetrating questions, at least those concerned with the natural world. Others think there is only so much we can know, that there are some very concrete limits to how much information we can gather about reality. These limits are not just a consequence of our brains or the tools we use to extract knowledge. They are Nature's trademarks.

So, which one of the two views is the right one?

Perhaps nowhere in the history of science this split is better expressed than in the famous Einstein-Bohr debates. The two giants of twentieth century physics, with a deep intellectual respect for each other, locked horns on several occasions trying to make sense of the puzzling new science they helped developed, quantum mechanics.

Read more