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news release:
New magnet may help pull rare
isotope science into the future
East Lansing, MI, 14 May 2007:
One of the more daunting obstacles in the fast-paced world of rare isotope
research – designing a magnet that can handle high-radiation environments –
appears to have been cleared by Michigan State University's National
Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory researchers, or
NSCL.
Working with several collaborators in the
laboratory, Jonathan DeLauter, NSCL research and development physicist, and Al
Zeller, head of the NSCL research facilities department, developed a prototype
superconducting magnet robust enough to be used in new, high-beam-intensity
facilities. The magnet is described in the June issue of Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Applied Superconductivity.
That’s a breakthrough that’s key to accelerating
atomic nuclei. Accelerators, tools of the trade among nuclear scientists,
are machines used to speed up atomic nuclei to hundreds of millions of miles per
hour and then collide these nuclei with other atoms. These collisions create
rare isotopes, fleeting bits of matter that don’t normally exist on Earth.
Scientists use rare isotopes in basic and applied research, such as studying the
origin of the elements and treatment of disease.
Magnets are used in accelerator facilities to
filter the beam of speeding atomic nuclei. By adjusting the field generated by
the magnets, researchers are able to sift the few novel, sought-after nuclei
from among a riot of other particles.
In new accelerator facilities, the magnets will
have to operate in intense radiation environments that would wear out even the
best-insulated conventional magnets in just months. Even though scientists have
known for years that magnets might be properly designed and shielded to handle
high-radiation environments, a precise engineering blueprint has remained
elusive.
Roughly the size of a large shoebox, the
prototype magnet is only a fraction of the size of the magnets that will
eventually be needed in new facilities. However, the researchers took care in
selecting materials and making design choices such that, in the future, the
dimensions could be increased dramatically without affecting the magnet’s
overall performance.
“Everything in the magnet fabrication process can
be scaled up… which is not possible for other technologies of equivalent
radiation resistance,” writes DeLauter, who worked on the magnet project during
his graduate studies at NSCL.
The U.S. National Science Foundation and the
heavy-ion research facility Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt,
Germany, provided funding for the research. Brookhaven National Laboratory, the
Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and Tyco Thermal Controls made important technical contributions.
NSCL is a world-leading laboratory for rare
isotope research and nuclear science education.
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