The Cockcroft Institute

February 6, 2017

The PM Visits VELA and CLARA

As part of her recent visit to Daresbury Laboratory, the Prime Minister Theresa May was shown the VELA and CLARA accelerator R&D facilities by senior members of the Cockcroft Institute, highlighting the key technological and scientific developments being undertaken with…

February 3, 2017

Accelerators – Size Matters

A beam of electrons was first observed to be accelerated with a ‘gradient’ – or energy transfer rate - of 300 MV/m, which is very high for present-day accelerators, in a device rather like a microchip. This was made of…

January 25, 2017

Accelerator experience days for teenagers at Daresbury Laboratory

Building up on the great success of the interactive accelerator workshops for teenagers held last summer at the Cockcroft Institute located at Daresbury Laboratory, the QUASAR Group invited two further schools to join them for workshops in January. This gave…

January 16, 2017

European Antimatter R&D network launched

The Accelerators Validating Antimatter physics (AVA) project started officially on the 1 January 2017. AVA is an international collaboration of currently 25 institutions. Benefiting from almost 4 M€ of funding from the European Union, AVA will train no less than…

December 14, 2016

AWAKE Experiment reaches important milestone

AWAKE is a unique experiment at CERN using the high power SPS proton beam to drive large electric fields in a plasma in order to accelerate an externally injected electron beam. The Cockcroft Institute through the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool…

November 29, 2016

20 years of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

The European Union is celebrating 20 years of its Research Fellowship Programme. Since 1996, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) have provided grants to train excellent researchers at all stages of their careers - be they doctoral candidates or highly experienced…

November 23, 2016

Lancaster PhD student wins IET award

Samantha Pitman a 4th year PhD student at Lancaster University Engineering department and the Cockcroft Institute has won the IET best student poster prize at the joint IET/IMechE/IoP Particle Accelerator Engineering Network meeting at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on the 9th October.…

November 23, 2016

Non-invasive intensity measurements of low energy beams demonstrated for the first time

A precise measurement of absolute beam intensity is essential for many experiments. It is a key parameter to monitor losses in a beam and to calibrate the absolute number of particles delivered to the experiments. However, this type of measurement…

November 21, 2016

Multi-million pound Large Hadron Collider upgrade project launched

[caption id="attachment_4372" align="aligncenter" width="585"] Image: LHC - copyright Cecile Noels/CERN[/caption] A new multi-million pound international project led by researchers from the Cockcroft Institute has been launched to contribute to the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in…