Almost 50 participants gathered at the Technical University of Vienna between 7 – 9 May 2014 to participate to the 3rd oPAC Topic Workshop on Beam Diagnostics. The workshop was opened with a welcome address of CIVIDEC’s CEO, Prof. Erich Griesmayer, and Ms Luisa Griesmayer who was in charge of local organization together with the EU Project TEAM. oPAC project coordinator, Prof. Carsten P. Welsch from the Cockcroft Institute/University of Liverpool, then continued with a talk about the “Challenges and Trends in Beam Diagnostics” that provided an overview and motivation for the event. Dr. Peter Forck of GSI in Germany continued with a talk on “non-invasive profile monitors for heavy ion beams” before oPAC Fellows and other participants talked present their recent research achievements in this area. In the afternoon Dr. Volker Schlott, head of PSI’s beam diagnostics group, continued with an overview of “beam instrumentation for light sources and free electron lasers” that acted as basis for a series of shorter contributions in the area of light source diagnostics. The first day was completed by a session on instrumentation for medical accelerators, started with a talk by Dr. Fadmar Osmic on the new Medaustron cancer therapy facility in Vienna.
A comprehensive summary of beam loss monitoring technology and existing limitations by DESY’s head of the diagnostics groups, Dr. Kay Wittenburg, opened day 2 and was followed by several talks on specific monitor types and detector technologies such as diamond detectors and fibre optical sensors. The basis for the final session on current measurements at the extremes of intensity was laid by Dr. Jacques Marroncle from CEA in France. All talks are accessible through theworkshop home page.
Open discussions around future R&D requirements and training needs complemented the program. An international need for focused topical workshop, such as the one organized by the oPAC consortium, was found to be missing. This would be ideal for the community for knowledge exchange and could help improve international collaboration. Also, a lack of skilled experts and training initiatives was raised as an existing concern for most large scale research infrastructures.
The workshop was part of a series of events from the oPAC network coordinated by the University of Liverpool and led by Professor Carsten P. Welsch. The network is much obliged to CIVIDEC for hosting the workshop. In particular, a very special thank you to Luisa Griesmayer for the invaluable help in organizing the event.
The oPAC project is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement Number 289485.
Marie Curie International Training Networks aim to improve career perspectives of early-stage researchers in both public and private sectors, thereby making research careers more attractive to young people. This will be achieved through a trans-national networking mechanism, aimed at structuring the existing high quality initial research training capacity throughout Member States and associated countries. In particular, they aim to add to the employability of the recruited researchers through exposure to both academia and enterprise, thus extending the traditional academic research training setting and eliminating cultural and other barriers to mobility. Grants are awarded through a highly competitive process.