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SAREC Reviews First FACET Proposals

(Photo)
SAREC members, from the left: Jie Gao (IHEP), Gerry Dugan (Cornell), Eric Esarey (LBNL), Kaoru Yokoya (KEK), Carsten Hast (SLAC), Vitaly Yakimenko (BNL), Sergei Nagaitsev (FNAL), Frank Zimmermann (CERN), Andrei Seryi (JAI), Katherine Harkay (ANL), Uwe Bergmann (SLAC). Not pictured: LK Len (Doe Office of High Energy Physics). (Photo by Lori Ann White.)

The SLAC Accelerator Research Experimental Program Committee, or SAREC, held its first meeting this week to review proposals for research to be conducted in SLAC's accelerator test facilities. The international committee, chaired by former SLACer Andrei Seryi (now director of the John Adams Institute of Accelerator Science), evaluated nine proposals. All of them propose research projects using SLAC's Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests.

SAREC was formed last year to be "a review committee for accelerator research and development at all accelerator research test facilities at SLAC," said FACET Project Manager Nan Phinney, "but this meeting is focused on FACET." Installation of the FACET facility is scheduled to be complete in late spring, clearing the way for user-assisted commissioning and early science as soon as July. The project team aims to reach the final construction milestone, Critical Decision 4—marking official completion of the facility—in late 2011. The facility will support a user program with an emphasis on wakefield-driven beam acceleration.

Additional discussions at this week's meeting covered the capabilities and research and development taking place at the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator and the Accelerator Structure Test Area, two additional SLAC test facilities that support research into next-generation accelerator technology. While the NLCTA and ASTA facilities have largely been used for SLAC research to date, Phinney said that external user proposals will be considered in the future.

The committee reports directly to Accelerator Research Division Director Tor Raubenheimer. For those interested, the meeting agenda and presentations are available on the ARD FACET Web site.

—by Lori Ann White
  
SLAC Today, January 14, 2011