CERN Accelerator School (advanced edition)

CERN jointly with NCBJ has organized in Warsaw and Świerk another edition of advanced  School of Accelerators. Nearly 100 attendees from the entire world will be deepening their knowledge on accelerator physics and technology between September 27 and October 9, 2015.

„We are very satisfied that this year edition of CERN Accelerator School has been organized in Poland” – points out Professor Grzegorz Wrochna, NCBJ Director General – „Scientific experiments we have been conducting in CERN, the largest research facility in the world, have greatly helped us to develop and improve technologies of particle accelerators. The technologies find numerous practical applications in fields such as industry or border security control, but perhaps first of all in human health protection. Medical accelerators are nowadays just indispensable in oncology therapy”.

Mutual exchange of know-how and transfer of knowledge to younger generations of students, PhD’s, physicists and engineers are among the principal objectives of the CERN Accelerator School. Some outstanding experts in accelerator physics from the globally most recognized research centres will be the school speakers. The school attendees will be presented such topics as RF measurements, beam diagnostics, design & optimization of beam optics.

„Attendees of the CERN Accelerator School will be given an opportunity to experiment with real accelerator beams in an unique measurement lab” – explains Eng. Sławomir Wronka, Associate Professor and Head of the NCBJ Particle Acceleration Physics and Technology Division – „We are going to present also our works accomplished for individual experiments run at LHC in CERN”.

The CERN Accelerator School initiative was born in Geneva in 1983. The School organized twice a year (one event at a basic level and another event at an advanced level) attracts accelerator physics professionals from the entire world. It’s objectives include to interest scientific community with capabilities of particle accelerators, to promote accelerator research on the global arena, and to provide physics/technology students with an opportunity to directly interact with leading accelerator scientists.

Poland officially joined the CERN organization in 1991. These days nearly 300 among 8,000 scientists and technicians working at all LHC experiments have come from Poland (NCBJ Świerk, UW Warsaw University Physics Faculty, PW Warsaw University of Technology, AGH University of Technology in Cracow, IFJ PAN Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Nuclear Physics in Cracow, and from some other institutions). Some of them have been or are still holding very responsible positions: Professor Agnieszka Zalewska (IFJ PAN) is currently CERN Council President; Professor Ewa Rondio (NCBJ) has been CERN Management Board Member; Professor Ryszard Sosnowski (NCBJ) has been Deputy CERN Council President; Professors Helena Białkowska (NCBJ) and Jan Nassalski (NCBJ) have been CERN Scientific Committees Members; Professor Nassalski has represented Polish physicists in CERN Council; Professor Grzegorz Wrochna (NCBJ) has been the Coordinator of an international team developing one of CMS detector subassemblies; Professor Krzysztof Meissner (UW) is one of two Coordinators of the OSQAR experiment; Professor Michał Turała (AGH) has been Head of CERN Electronics and Computing for Physics Division.

Polish scientists are responsible for design and construction of some key LHC elements. NCBJ Division of Nuclear Equipment (HITEC) has participated in modernization of the first stage of the line used to pre-accelerate particles for LHC. Dedicated chambers to bunch protons in packets have been developed and constructed also in Świerk. Warsaw CMS Group (UW, NCBJ, PW) has re-designed muon trigger electronic circuitry originally developed by the same Group in 2009. Polish members of the LHCb team have designed and constructed a large part of the trace detector composed of numerous straw-tube drift chambers. Polish members of the ALICE team participated in development of PHOS (Photon Spectrometer) electromagnetic calorimeter used to reconstruct properties of pi zero mesons and “lobe” photons. IT infrastructure under development in Poland has been hooked up to the “Worldwide LHC Computing Grid” composed of 160 computer centres. Jointly NCBJ (CIŚ), AGH and ICM computer centres can make available about 1,100  processor cores, more than 500 TB storage, dedicated software scientific applications, and efficient networking infrastructure (redundant fibre optic links of 10 Gbit/s throughput). For comparison: just one LHC experiment (CMS) is generating data at the rate of about 100 Mb per second.

LHC recently resumed data acquisition after the nearly two-year long break. Plenty of improvements and new technical solutions introduced during that period were aimed to attain the design parameters of the accelerator. Some superconducting magnets were replaced, all have been tested. A new cryogenic system supplying the magnets and a more safe vacuum system have been developed.. Better beam focussing solutions, higher voltage rating and more radiation tolerant electronic circuits have been introduced. The performed works had to be done at high precision due to high complexity of the manipulated systems, had to be supervised by a number of high-class experts from various fields of technology, and needed rather long time. Polish groups actively participated in the works. Value of the works is estimated for 150 millions Swiss francs.

LHC is now accelerating particles to the designed energy of 13 TeV, the largest energy ever obtained in history. Collisions take place every 25 nanosecond, therefore scientists are now acquiring experimental data at a twice as much rate as before. Energy liberated at such collisions is so high that some produced and observed new particles could not have be practically produced and observed elsewhere. Studies on such energetic particles give scientists insight what was happening just after the Big Bang.