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Workshop Highlights Coming Test Beam Activities

(Photo - ESTB 2011 participants)
ESTB 2011 participants.
(Photo by Photo by Barbara Hemstad.)

Last Thursday, the Accelerator Research Division's Test Facilities Department hosted the first End Station A Test Beam Workshop at SLAC. The End Station A Test Beam Project, which will provide an electron beam for use in research and development, attracted 50 attendees total, including 24 from 16 outside institutions and five different countries. Even ahead of the workshop, the organizers had already received eight proposals with requests for beam time. There were 13 presentations from potential users spanning a wide diversity of research projects, including silicon detector and silicon readout R&D, advances for the ATLAS detector and Super-B sensors, new calibration measurements for the Fermi Large Area Telescope detector, accelerator R&D studies for proposed future linear colliders, fundamental measurements of cosmic particle showers and more. All participants were enthusiastic about the project and very appreciative that later this year SLAC will once again provide test beams to the community.

(Photo - SLAC Research Yard)
The SLAC Research Yard. (Photo by Peter Ginter.)

"We are absolutely impressed by the response we received to re-starting the End Station A test beamline," said Carsten Hast, head of the Test Facilities Department at SLAC. "This underlines the needs of a variety of physics research fields and the importance of available test beams."

Currently, plans include the installation of one "kicker" magnet—a dipole magnet used to "kick" an incoming particle beam into a particle accelerator—in the Beam Switch Yard this spring. This will allow early commissioning of the kicker system running the beam into the beamline upstream of End Station A. As soon as a new Personal Protection System for End Station A is available later this summer, the plan is to run a low energy beam into the endstation to start commissioning the complete test beamline.

"In late October, we will install four new kicker magnets with ceramics chambers in the Beam Switch Yard and start operating the End Station A Test Beam at higher beam energy in November," said Mauro Pivi, ARD physicist and workshop organizer. As part of the Test Facilities Department, Pivi will be in charge of user support for the facility.

—SLAC Today, March 24, 2011