A week-long oPAC advanced School on Accelerator Optimization took place from 7th to 11th July 2014. The event was hosted by Royal Holloway University of London (UK) and was joined by around 80 delegates from across Europe. The School covered accelerator optimization through beam physics studies, instrumentation R&D and charged particle beam simulations at an advanced level. It was opened with a welcome address by the RHUL Vice-Principal for Research and Enterprise and Dean of Science Prof. Paul Hogg. All aspects of accelerator optimization were then presented by lecturers from universities, research centres and industry throughout the week and led to many interesting discussions between participants.
Of particular interest were also the tutorials held during the week, a lively poster session on Thursday afternoon and seminars about the discovery of the Higgs particle by Prof. Phil Burrows, University of Oxford, and a lecture about different roads into the antimatter-world by Dr. Michael Doser from CERN. The School provided excellent opportunities for networking with colleagues from other institutions and also included also a visit to the city of London.
Meetings of the oPAC Steering Committee and Supervisory Board also took place during a busy week and plans were made for future events and all R&D projects within the network were discussed. Prof. Carsten P. Welsch, oPAC coordinator, said: “We received excellent feedback from the participants and had a fantastic atmosphere throughout the week. The large number of participants underlines that there is a growing need for similar training events and oPAC will provide many additional training opportunities in the near future.”
All lectures are available online via the projects’ indico site. Further information about the oPAC project can be found on the oPAC home page.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 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.