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Cold linac’ commissioning major step for
ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source
Oak Ridge, Tenn., August 19: The Spallation Neutron Source at
the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has met a crucial
milestone on its way to completion in June 2006 -- operation of the
superconducting section of its linear accelerator. The SNS linac has two sections: a room-temperature, or warm,
section, which completed its commissioning last January, and a superconducting,
or cold, section, which operates at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero.
The cold linac provides the bulk of the power that drives the linac, and has
already achieved an energy level of 865 MeV, which is about 75 percent of the
speed of light. The SNS linac is the world’s first high energy, high power
linac to apply superconducting technology to the acceleration of protons.
“The successful operation of the cold linac is a major step
toward the 2006 completion of the SNS and demonstrates the success of the
collaboration of national labs in keeping the project on time, on budget and on
scope. It represents, technically, one of the most complex systems of the SNS
facility,” said Thom Mason, ORNL’s associate director for the SNS.
“This successful test is just another indicator of the
outstanding team of men and women that ORNL has brought together to build and
operate the SNS facility. They can be justifiably proud of this
accomplishment,” said Les Price, DOE’s project director for the SNS.
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in
Virginia, part of the team of six DOE national laboratories collaborating on the
DOE Office of Science project, was responsible for the superconducting linac and
its refrigeration system. Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico provided
the radio-frequency systems that drive the linac. The other DOE national
laboratories supporting ORNL in the SNS collaboration are Argonne, Lawrence
Berkeley, and Brookhaven.
“Jefferson Lab congratulates the Oak Ridge SNS team on this
major milestone,” said Claus Rode, SNS project manager for Jefferson Lab.
“The SNS project was a challenging five-year effort that used all of Jefferson
Lab’s expertise in superconducting radiofrequency technology.”
SNS will produce neutrons by accelerating a pulsed beam of
high-energy protons down the 1,000-foot linac, compressing each pulse to high
intensity, and delivering them to a liquid mercury target where neutrons are
produced in a process called “spallation.”
SNS will increase the intensity of pulsed neutrons available
to researchers nearly tenfold, providing higher quality images molecular
structures and motion. Together, ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor and SNS will
represent the world’s foremost facilities for neutron scattering, a technique
pioneered at ORNL shortly after World War II.
When completed next year, SNS will become the world’s
leading research facility for study of the structure and dynamics of materials
using neutrons. It will operate as a user facility that will enable researchers
from the United States and abroad to study the science of materials that forms
the basis for new technologies in telecommunications, manufacturing,
transportation, information technology, biotechnology and health.
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