EMMA’s First Milestone
On Friday 26 March, accelerator physicists at STFC Daresbury Laboratory achieved a significant milestone after successfully commissioning the first beam into EMMA (Electron Model for Many Applications). Following intense activity resulting in the installation and hardware commissioning of the ALICE to EMMA injection lines, a 27.5 MeV beam from ALICE was diverted into the line and successfully transported to its end.
EMMA is the world’s first R&D prototype of a non-scaling fixed field alternating gradient accelerator (ns-FFAG), designed to both prove the technology and develop a design for ns-FFAG, which has always been conceptual, and then intended to investigate its possible applications.
EMMA’s rapid acceleration, compact design and configuration has not been built before and its technology is expected to pave the way for a number of significant applications, from providing simpler, more compact and cheaper cancer therapy machines for hospitals through to powering nuclear reactors for safer and cleaner energy, as well as, eventually, scanning cargo containers for contraband.
Susan Smith said “This milestone is fantastic news and the team has worked tremendously hard to achieve this first beam. Ns-FFAG is unproven accelerator physics that requires proof of principle. EMMA has developed from a simple demonstration objective to a world first, sophisticated instrument for accelerator physics experiments. We fully expect that one day EMMA will open up whole new areas to accelerator technology.”
EMMA, which has 84 quadrupole magnets, is divided into seven segments. The next step will be the installation of EMMA’s ring systems which will allow a preliminary 4/7th commissioning trial to take place in the summer. This will be followed by the much anticipated whole ring commissioning together with the World’s first demonstration of the new mode of acceleration that EMMA is designed to deliver.
31 August 2010