Fermilab’s Chief Strategic Partnerships Officer, Alison Markovitz, visited Daresbury on 6 June as part of a UK stakeholder visit, where she was shown the ASTeC Superconducting RF Laboratory (SuRFLab) and the vast hall formerly occupied by the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS).
Building on AsTEC’s experience in delivering superconducting cavities for the European Spallation Source project, preparations are being made to expand and develop SuRFLab to deliver an even more challenging technical project, the Proton Improvement Plan-II (PIP-II).
The PIP-II particle accelerator will be the new heart of Fermilab, featuring a brand-new, 800-MeV, leading-edge superconducting linear accelerator to power a broad range of particle physics experiments. PIP-II will enable the most intense high-energy neutrino beam for the laboratory’s flagship project—the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (LBNF/DUNE).
PIP-II is the first U.S. accelerator project that will have significant contributions from international partners. Ground-breaking for the project occurred in March 2019 and start of operations is expected by the middle of next decade.
AsTEC will also deliver a series of huge Anode Plane Assembly (APA) detector frames for DUNE, which will help scientists explore the properties of neutrinos produced by the Fermilab accelerators. A remarkable transformation is underway in the ex-SRS inner-hall to assemble the APAs.