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11 May 2013
ALPHA-X Topical Workshop
Approximately
30 delegates enjoyed a wealth of enlightening presentations on contemporary
topics in laser-plasma physics, FELs and related areas of interest to the ALPHA-X
partnership at an open research meeting held on 2-3 May 2013 at the
Cockcroft Institute. The meeting was hosted by the Lancaster Mathematical
Physics Group and featured several invited talks from members of the Cockcroft
Institute including speakers from ASTeC, University of Manchester and Lancaster
University as well as invited talks from researchers based at University
of Strathclyde. …read more»
18 April 2013
Institute of Physics Particle Accelerators and Beams Group Annual Meeting held at Cockcroft Institute on 10th April

The 2013 annual meeting of the IoP’s Particle Accelerators and Beams group was held in the Cockcroft Institute on 10th April.
12 April 2013
Punching Holes for the Highest Energy Ever
Lancaster Student brings Engineering Solutions to the LHC Consolidation
The LHC has been busy generating data for the past couple of years in order to find the Higgs boson. But now it has it is taking a well earned rest and in the meantime a Lancaster student is helping to increase its energy reach for when it returns. Up to now LHC has not been able to reach its full 14 TeV energy due to problems in the interconnections on the superconducting magnets. A failure in one of these resulted in a catastrophic explosion nine days after start-up. The CERN staff were able to recover from this but they have waited till now to repair it.
25 March 2013
Cockcroft Institute offers advanced researcher skills training for EU network
The gaining of complementary skills is one of the aims of the
European Higher Education Area as it promotes training to ensure that all
graduates have the skills necessary to enter the global job market. The
Marie Curie Initial Training Network LA³NET, coordinated by Prof.
Carsten P. Welsch from the Cockcroft Institute/University of Liverpool,
aims to improve the employability of its fellows by providing both subject-specific
and generic training from a variety of academic and industry trainers.
For this purpose a week-long School was now held in Liverpool between March
18th-22nd 2013.
…read more »
3 March 2013
EU Grant awarded to develop next generation sensor technology
Sensors
capable of detecting single photons are of critical importance for a very
wide range of scientific and technical applications in such areas as medical
imaging, biotechnology, high energy physics, scientific instrumentation,
communication, and homeland security, including, in particular, positron
emission tomography, flow cytometry, Cherenkov cosmic ray telescopy, laser
ranging, optical time domain reflectometry or beam loss monitoring in particle
accelerators and light sources.
…read more »
14 Februrary 2013
Accelerator Timing Monitor with Femtosecond Precision.
“LA3NET” Marie Curie PhD Fellowship
(Salary £30k + allowances)
The next generation of accelerators require unprecedented stability and precision in the synchronization of free-electron lasers, laser wakefields and time-resolved spectroscopy. Leading technological techniques to providing such precision is based on laser optical clocks and actively stabilised optical fibre distribution systems. These deliver better than 5 femtosecond stability and are advancing rapidly towards the attosecond regime. The Electron Beam Test Facility (EBTF) is a new accelerator with a high performance, modular injector currently being built at Daresbury Laboratory, which will deliver a capability for the cutting edge development of advanced accelerator systems.
…read more» (pdf)
14 Februrary 2013
STFC publicise Cockcroft Institute activity in Europe
The role of the Cockcroft Institute and the University of Liverpool in coordinating the LA3NET project and hosting researchers feature in the latest edition of the ‘UK news from CERN’ bulletin. This publication is issued by STFC to showcase UK research activity at CERN to policy makers and the general public. …read
more»
20 November 2012
Please check here for CI positions
- Research Associate at the University of Manchester’s School of Physics and Astronomy and based at the Cockcroft Institute …further information »
- PhD research projects »
- PhD recruitment »
Welcome
The Cockcroft Institute is an international centre for Accelerator Science and Technology (AST) in the UK. It was proposed in September 2003 and officially opened by the UK Minister for Science, Lord Sainsbury, in September 2006. It is a joint venture between the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool and Manchester, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC at the Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA). The Institute is located in a purpose-built building on the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus adjacent to the Daresbury Laboratory and the Daresbury Innovation Centre, and has established satellite centres in each of the participating universities.
The Institute provides the intellectual focus, educational infrastructure and the essential scientific and technological facilities for accelerator science and technology research and development, which will enable UK scientists and engineers to take a major role in innovating future tools for scientific discoveries and in the conception, design, construction and use of the world’s leading research accelerators for the foreseeable future.
The Institute is named after the Nobel prizewinner Sir John Cockcroft FRS . Born in Todmorden in north west England, and educated in part in Manchester, he is regarded as the pioneer of modern accelerator research.
Cockcroft’s subatomic legacy: splitting the atom (pdf)
This article first appeared in CERN Courier December 2007, and is reprinted with permission.
Amazing particles and light (CERN Courier March 2007)
Accelerators for nano- and biosciences (CERN Courier Oct 2002)


