The latest ASTeC Highlights Report ,which covers some of the core activities of the Cockcroft Institute, has just been published on the ASTeC website. This report covers two financial years 2021/22 and 2022/23.
In the words of ASTeC Director Jim Clarke, “The past two years have been the most exciting period in ASTeC’s history.”
The report includes the developments in CLARA, ASTeC’s flagship test facility. ASTeC scientists and technicians have been finalising the assembly and installation phases of the ambitious upgrade of CLARA. The final components being installed into the CLARA facility will enhance the energy by a factor of five, the brightness by a factor of hundred, the repetition rate by a factor of ten, and the laser power at the experiments by a factor of twelve. All together, these enhancements will make CLARA Europe’s premier accelerator test facility.
The report also contains ASTeC’s in-kind contributions to leading new international facilities: superconducting RF cavities for the European Spallation Source; cryomodules housing SRF cavities for the Proton Improvement Plan-II at Fermilab in the US; and the crab cavity cryomodule prototype for the High Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider.
The UKRI investments into new accelerator infrastructures are highlighted in the report. ASTeC is playing a leading role in RUEDI, an exciting new electron diffraction and imaging facility, ITRF, a facility which plans to revolutionise ion based radiotherapy treatments, and UK XFEL, a design study and options analysis which will offer UK researchers access to the brightest X-ray source on the planet. In addition ASTeC has been supporting the delivery of the Extreme Photonics Applications Centre and Diamond-II at the Harwell Campus.
Further details regarding all of these activities and the people which make them possible are provided in the report.
Jim Clarke declares, “I am incredibly proud of the ‘can do’ attitude which is intrinsic to ASTeC and it is great credit to my staff that we deliver successfully on all fronts and our reputation continues to grow!”
The report can be accessed at: https://www.astec.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/ASTeC_Science_Highlights_Final.pdf