The 9th Particle Accelerator Engineering Network (PAEN) annual meeting took place at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) on the 6th October 2023. The network was jointly created by the IET, IMechE, IoP and STFC and is hosted by the IET as one of their technical networks. 120 delegates from all areas of engineering of particle accelerators attended the event.
This year’s keynote talk was given by Stephen Gallimore, who leads the target design section at ISIS. He presented the recent ISIS target upgrade, which was followed up with a talk from ISIS target technician Justin Miles giving the upgrade from a technician’s point of view.
Another highlight of the day was a panel discussion chaired by Dan Faircloth (ISIS). Industry leaders, including John Allen (Elekta), Phil Atkinson (STFC), Graeme Burt (University of Lancaster/Cockcroft Institute), Steve Jago (ISIS) and Peter McIntosh (STFC/Cockcroft Institute), discussed topics covering technician recruitment and retention, key R&D for the sector, and sustainability of particle accelerators.
The network is seeking three new committee members. Preferably, committee members should be engineers or technicians working in particle accelerators but can be at any stage of their career and be from labs, academia or industry. Applications from diverse backgrounds are encouraged. The committee meets 4 times per year (one of which is normally in person) and are involved in organising group activities. Appointments are for a term of 3 years. To apply contact Gemma Hadley (GHadley@theiet.org) before the 19th November 2023. Applications will be balanced against a skills matrix to ensure the committee covers the full range of engineering disciplines and at present we lack a technician member, an early career member and we could do with more mechanical members.
Upcoming events
The National Particle accelerator Open Day will take place on 30th October 2023 at RAL. Undergraduate students will have the opportunity to visit a working particle accelerator and employers can book a table at the recruitment event.
The network is currently planning workshops on Sustainable Accelerators, and Functional Safety for 2024 and the 4th PAEN webinar will focus on Engineering of Medical Accelerators. Next years annual meeting will be held at Daresbury.
Sign-up for Accelerator Engineering info
We have set-up a mailing list for people interested in news on particle accelerator engineering in the UK. This is a personal initiative and not part of the IET, IMechE or IOP. We will send out announcements of workshops and events via this mailing list as well as sending round a new bi-annual PAEN newsletter that will be created in 2022. To sign up please visit
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?SUBED1=PARACCENGUK&A=1
Website
Our website is moving to the new IET Eng-X programme and will be updated over the next month:
https://engx.theiet.org/technical-networks/partacc
To find posts about the network please search for ‘particle accelerators’.