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SABER Moves Forward

(Photo - SABER) On a Friday afternoon late in May, Paul Bellomo, Martin Berndt, Jim Craft and Roger Erickson ventured into the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) South Arc Tunnel. There, they orchestrated the first beamline configuration change for SABER, the South Arc Beam Experimental Region project.

SABER is a replacement for the Final Focus Test Beam (FFTB), which is currently being dismantled to make room for the Linac Coherent Light Source Beam Transport Hall. When it's completed, SABER would allow high-energy physics experiments to continue at the lab. These experiments would support research in the fields of laboratory astrophysics, beam-plasma physics, and condensed matter physics at ultra-fast time scales.

In the SLC, Bellomo, Berndt, Craft and Erickson prepared for resistance measurements of a string of 42 magnets. The SLC tunnel holds 466 of these magnets arranged in 23 groups; SABER would only need two of these groups to deliver the beam to the proposed experimental area.

By rearranging electrical cables to exclude the other 21 groups of magnets, the SABER team was able to conduct tests to determine what kind of power supply is needed to run SABER's 42 magnets.

"The ability to specify the optimal power supply takes us one step closer to making SABER a reality," said Roger Erickson.

—Jim Craft
   SLAC Today, June 13, 2006

Image: Erickson, Berndt and Bellomo stand in front of one of 23 sections of magnets formerly used to focus and steer a high-energy positron beam. SABER will use two of these sections to deliver a ~30 GeV beam.