IPAC’15, the sixth International Particle Accelerator Conference, was held in historic Richmond, Virginia, USA from May 3-8, 2015 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. With more than 1,000 contributed papers, IPAC is the largest annual event in the field of particle accelerators, joining experts from all around the world. All CI partner institutions contributed to the scientific program.
The Manchester Group contributed more than 15 posters and papers, with a diverse collection of research topics, ranging from beam dynamics in the LHC, novel FFAGs, through to high gradient acceleration using wakefields induced in plasma and, collinear two-beam acceleration in multi-harmonic copper cavities. Noteworthy was a paper on the high beam quality achieved through a custom-built facility at Manchester to provide a cold electron source. In many cases, this research entailed close collaboration with colleagues throughout the world on inter alia, projects based at CERN, ESS, and Yale University. Several papers delineated work which relies on direct application of the CLARA facility at Daresbury to facilitate world-class experiments with the potential for groundbreaking results.
Lancaster presented studies into high gradient testing of an X-band crab cavity, a normal-conducting cyclinac for proton therapy research and radioisotope production, as well as the design of realistic undulators for intense gamma-ray beams at future colliders.
ASTeC staff led or contributed to 32 paper publications at IPAC15, covering a wide variety of accelerator programmes from beam dynamics simulation studies for an extensive array of accelerators including; HL-LHC, CLARA, ISIS, FFAGs, JPARC linac, dielectric accelerators and low emittance synchrotrons, to commissioning of new VELA experiments and hardware. ASTeC had a good representation of staff, Postdocs and PhD students in attendance. On the Wednesday afternoon, Dr. Shinji Machida from ASTeC’s Intense Beams Group gave an invited oral talk on Benchmarking and Application of Space Charge Codes for Rings.
Finally, the Liverpool Accelerator Physics Group had 13 contributions and showed recent results from our in-house gas jet setup for non-invasive beam diagnostics purposes, simulation studies into ultra-compact accelerators, tracking studies into the LHeC lattice, and results from studies at the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre into online dose monitoring.
Marie Curie Senior Fellow Dr. Javier Resta-Lopez contributed a talk on Intra-beam Scattering Effects in the low energy antimatter ring ELENA. The Group also contributed a dedicated stand, promoting the institute’s flagship oPAC and LA³NET projects.
IPAC featured many interesting presentations, including talks about the AWAKE project and the HL-LHC upgrade – both projects in which CI is heavily involved in. The conference was found to be an ideal meeting point allowing for fruitful discussion with collaboration partners from all over the world.
Pre-press proceedings have already been published and will soon also be available via our dissemination section.