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Posts Tagged ‘high-field magnets’

This article appeared in Fermilab Today on June 22, 2015.

Steve Gould of the Fermilab Technical Division prepares a cold test of a short quadrupole coil. The coil is of the type that would go into the High-Luminosity LHC. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Steve Gould of the Fermilab Technical Division prepares a cold test of a short quadrupole coil. The coil is of the type that would go into the High-Luminosity LHC. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Last month, a group collaborating across four national laboratories completed the first successful tests of a superconducting coil in preparation for the future high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider, or HL-LHC. These tests indicate that the magnet design may be adequate for its intended use.

Physicists, engineers and technicians of the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP) are working to produce the powerful magnets that will become part of the HL-LHC, scheduled to start up around 2025. The plan for this upgrade is to increase the particle collision rate, or luminosity, by approximately a factor of 10, so expanding the collider’s physics reach by creating 10 times more data.

“The upgrade will help us get closer to new physics. If we see something with the current run, we’ll need more data to get a clear picture. If we don’t find anything, more data may help us to see something new,” said Technical Division’s Giorgio Ambrosio, leader of the LARP magnet effort.

LARP is developing more advanced quadrupole magnets, which are used to focus particle beams. These magnets will have larger beam apertures and the ability to produce higher magnetic fields than those at the current LHC.

The Department of Energy established LARP in 2003 to contribute to LHC commissioning and prepare for upgrades. LARP includes Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC. Its members began developing the technology for advanced large-aperture quadrupole magnets around 2004.

The superconducting magnets currently in use at the LHC are made from niobium titanium, which has proven to be a very effective material to date. However, they will not be able to support the higher magnetic fields and larger apertures the collider needs to achieve higher luminosities. To push these limits, LARP scientists and engineers turned to a different material, niobium tin.

Niobium tin was discovered before niobium titanium. However, it has not yet been used in accelerators because, unlike niobium titanium, niobium tin is very brittle, making it susceptible to mechanical damage. To be used in high-energy accelerators, these magnets need to withstand large amounts of force, making them difficult to engineer.

LARP worked on this challenge for almost 10 years and went through a number of model magnets before it successfully started the fabrication of coils for 150-millimeter-aperture quadrupoles. Four coils are required for each quadrupole.

LARP and CERN collaborated closely on the design of the coils. After the first coil was built in the United States earlier this year, the LARP team successfully tested it in a magnetic mirror structure. The mirror structure makes possible tests of individual coils under magnetic field conditions similar to those of a quadrupole magnet. At 1.9 Kelvin, the coil exceeded 19 kiloamps, 15 percent above the operating current.

The team also demonstrated that the coil was protected from the stresses and heat generated during a quench, the rapid transition from superconducting to normal state.

“The fact that the very first test of the magnet was successful was based on the experience of many years,” said TD’s Guram Chlachidze, test coordinator for the magnets. “This knowledge and experience is well recognized by the magnet world.”

Over the next few months, LARP members plan to test the completed quadrupole magnet.

“This was a success for both the people building the magnets and the people testing the magnets,” said Fermilab scientist Giorgio Apollinari, head of LARP. “We still have a mountain to climb, but now we know we have all the right equipment at our disposal and that the first step was in the right direction.”

Diana Kwon

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This article appeared in Fermilab Today on April 3, 2015.

This magnet recently achieved an important milestone, reaching its design field of 11.5 Tesla. It is the first successful niobium-3-tin, twin-aperture accelerator magnet in the world. Photo: Sean Johnson

This magnet recently achieved an important milestone, reaching its design field of 11.5 Tesla. It is the first successful niobium-3-tin, twin-aperture accelerator magnet in the world. Photo: Sean Johnson

Last month, a new superconducting magnet developed and fabricated at Fermilab reached its design field of 11.5 Tesla at a temperature nearly as cold as outer space. It is the first successful twin-aperture accelerator magnet made of niobium-3-tin in the world.

The advancements in niobium-3-tin, or Nb3Sn, magnet technology and the ongoing U.S. collaboration with CERN on the development of these and other Nb3Sn magnets are enabling the use of this innovative technology for future upgrades of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They may also provide the cornerstone for future circular machines of interest to the worldwide high-energy physics community. Because of the exceptional challenges — Nb3Sn is brittle and requires high-temperature processing — this important milestone was achieved at Fermilab after decades of worldwide R&D efforts both in the Nb3Sn conductor itself and in associated magnet technologies.

Superconducting magnets are at the heart of most particle accelerators for fundamental science as well as other scientific and technological applications. Superconductivity is also being explored for use in biosensors and quantum computing.

Thanks to Nb3Sn’s stronger superconducting properties, it enables magnets of larger field than any in current particle accelerators. As a comparison, the niobium-titanium dipole magnets built in the early 1980s for the Tevatron particle collider produced about 4 Tesla to bend the proton and antiproton beams around the ring. The most powerful niobium-titanium magnets used in the LHC operate at roughly 8 Tesla. The new niobium-3-tin magnet creates a significantly stronger field.

Because the Tevatron accelerated positively charged protons and negatively charged antiprotons, its magnets had only one aperture. By contrast, the LHC uses two proton beams. This requires two-aperture magnets with fields in opposite directions. And because the LHC collides beams at higher energies, it requires larger magnetic fields.

In the process of upgrading the LHC and in conceiving future particle accelerators and detectors, the high-energy physics community is investing as never before in high-field magnet technologies. This creative process involves the United States, Europe, Japan and other Asian countries. The latest strategic plan for U.S. high-energy physics, the 2014 report by the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, endorses continued U.S. leadership in superconducting magnet technology for future particle physics programs. The U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP), which comprises four DOE national laboratories — Berkeley Lab, Brookhaven Lab, Fermilab and SLAC — plays a key role in this strategy.

The 15-year investment in Nb3Sn technology places the Fermilab team led by scientist Alexander Zlobin at the forefront of this effort. The Fermilab High-Field Magnet Group, in collaboration with U.S. LARP and CERN, built the first reproducible series in the world of single-aperture 10- to 12-Tesla accelerator-quality dipoles and quadrupoles made of Nb3Sn, establishing a strong foundation for the LHC luminosity upgrade at CERN.

The laboratory has consistently carried out in parallel an assertive superconductor R&D program as key to the magnet success. Coordination with industry and universities has been critical to improve the performance of the next generation of high-field accelerator magnets.

The next step is to develop 15-Tesla Nb3Sn accelerator magnets for a future very high-energy proton-proton collider. The use of high-temperature superconductors is also becoming a realistic prospect for generating even larger magnetic fields. An ultimate goal is to develop magnet technologies based on combining high- and low-temperature superconductors for accelerator magnets above 20 Tesla.

The robust and versatile infrastructure that was developed at Fermilab, together with the expertise acquired by the magnet scientists and engineers in design and analysis tools for superconducting materials and magnets, makes Fermilab an ideal setting to look to the future of high-field magnet research.

Emanuela Barzi

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