Report for EPS

Report for EPS

The 8th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC’17, took place at the Bella Center Copenhagen, Denmark, from Sunday to Friday, 14 to 19 May, 2017.

It was attended by more than 1350 full time delegates from approximately 34different countries. All participants considered (incl. JACOW team, grant students and exhibitors), IPAC’17 was visited by 1550 people, almost 20% of them women.

Hosted by the European Spallation Source (ESS), it was supported by MAXIV and Aarhus University. It was organized under the auspices and with the support of the European Physical Society Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).

The attendance of almost 100 young scientists and engineers from all over the world was made possible through the sponsorship of the following societies, institutes and laboratories (in alphabetical order):

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), The American Physical Society Division of Physics of Beams APS-DB and the United States National Science Foundation (Plasma Physics and Accelerator Science) from the Americas, the Asian Committee for Future Accelerators (ACFA) with contributions from AS, IBS, IHEP, IMP, KAERI, KEK, KIRAMS, NSRRC, PAL, RIKEN Nishina, RIKEN Spring-8, SSRF from Asia, the European Physical Society Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) with contributions from ALBA, CEA Saclay, CERN, Cockcroft Institute, DESY, Diamond, ElettraSincrotrone Trieste, ESRF, ESS, GANIL, GSI/FAIR, HZB, IN2P3, INFN, John Adams Institute, PSI, SOLEIL, STFC from Europe.

The organisers of IPAC’17 are grateful to all sponsors for their valuable support.

Gianluigi Arduini (CERN), Chair of the Organising Committee (OC) and Mats Lindroos (ESS), Chair of the Local Organising Committee (LOC), opened the conference. Their appearances framed welcoming words by:

• Danish Minister for Higher Education and Science SørenPind
• Swedish State Secretary to the Minister for Higher Education and Research Karin Röding
• ESS Director General John Womersley

During the opening plenary session, the Danish Minister for Higher Education and Science SørenPind and the Swedish State Secretary to the Minister for Higher Education and Research Karin Röding welcomed participants to the conference and highlighted the role of accelerators as sophisticated and precise instruments for fundamental and applied research initially developed for the understanding of the infinitesimal constituents of matter. Nowadays they serve the society by contributing to improve our everyday life in several domains ranging from medicine and energy, to the arts and security.

MAX-IV and European Spallation Source, respectively operating and being built in Lund, Sweden, just across the Oresund bridge, are two of the most powerful instruments that researchers in material science and life science will have at their hands in the near future exploiting complementarity between X-rays and neutrons. The IPAC’17 scientific programme was opened by a presentation on the successful commissioning of one of the most brilliant source of ultra-short flashes of X-rays based on the Free Electron Laser (FEL) concept, the European X-FEL at DESY Hamburg. First lasing was achieved a few days before, just in time for the announcement at the conference. The second presentation focused on the impressive progress in the design and construction of ESS.

Light sources represent a continuously increasing fraction of the accelerators worldwide and they excel not only for their number but also for the continuous improvement in their performance in terms of brilliance and time structure. In addition to the European X-FEL another facility, the SwissFEL at PSI, has produced laser radiation for the first time in the soft x-ray regime and it is being progressively commissioned to achieve smaller wavelength by the end of the year. New synchrotron light sources have come to operation like the Polish synchrotron radiation facility SOLARIS in Krakow and upgrades based on new concepts, like the Hybrid Multi Bend Achromat for the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, are planned. This concept has earned Pantaleo Raimondi from ESRF the EPS-AG IPAC’17 GershBudker Prize, for “a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field, with no age limit”.

The bigger brother of all accelerators, the LHC at CERN was on the spotlight thanks to its outstanding performance achieved in 2016, the nominal luminosity has been achieved and exceeded by almost 50% thanks to the operation with tighter spaced bunches (25 ns) and due to the higher brightness of the beams delivered by the LHC injectors. The operation with these beams has been made possible thanks to a progressive beam conditioning of the surfaces of the LHC beam screens (“scrubbing”) and by mastering the effects of electron clouds on beam stability and in terms of heat load on the cryo-magnets. The achievement of the nominal luminosity in the LHC has marked the ideal completion of one of the most ambitious science projects worldwide, testifying Lyndon Evans’ leadership abilities and experience which motivated the award of the EPS-AG IPAC’17 Rolf Wideröe Prize for “outstanding work in the accelerator field without age limit” to him.

Particle physics remains one of the main drivers for the conception of new accelerator projects and for the development of new accelerator physics and technology concepts. On the front of the electron positron colliders Super KEKB at KEK, Tsukuba, Japan has seen the successful commissioning with beam.The installation of the superconducting quadrupoles and correctors of the final focussing system close to the interaction point and the BELLE experiment are ongoingand the commissioning with beam is expected to restart at the beginning of 2018.

The quest for higher energy electron-positron circular and linear colliders has seen the achievement of an important milestone with the successful completion of the experimental validation of the main accelerator technology choices for the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) at the CLIC Test Facility 3 (CTF3) at CERN in 2016. In particular, high-gradient acceleration beyond 100 MV/m based on the two-beam concept using X-band room temperature is now well established. The impressive progress in the design of a high-luminosity circular electron-positron collider in the frame of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) design study has been presented as part of the oral programme in addition to several posters discussing the various aspects of this design together with the corresponding one for the hadron-hadron collider (FCC-hh) at CERN and similar studies underway in China (CepC and SppC).

Advances on the high-intensity, high-energy frontiers demand for continuous advances in accelerator technology. Superconductivity is playing a key role both in the design of high field magnets and of high gradient superconducting RF cavities for CW operation. A significant breakthrough has been made by the winner of the EPS-AG IPAC’17 Frank Sacherer Prize, Anna Grassellino from Fermilab. She first contributed to the improvement of the quality factor of superconducting cavities by discovering the technique of nitrogen-doping, and more recently showed how the method of nitrogen infusion has the potential to improve not only the quality factor but also the accelerating gradient. Also, normal conducting RF structures operated at high frequency have reached accelerating gradients up to 100-120 MV/m. The gain has come through a greatly increased understanding of high-power RF phenomena, development of quantitative high-gradient RF design methods, refinements in cavity fabrication techniques and through development of high peak RF power sources. This technology is attracting the attention of several laboratories worldwide as it can open the way to the construction of the next generation compact FEL based photon sources.

Innovative techniques are being conceived and being studied at CERN and in other laboratories. Amorphous Carbon coating of beam chambers against electron cloud, the development of crab cavities to increase the luminosity of colliders, collimation with hollow electron beams for active halo control of high intensity hadron beams, the use of Radio Frequency Quadrupoles (RFQ) against transverse instabilities were presented as some of the most promising concepts being developed or implemented as part of some of the major accelerator projects or design studies.

In the field of novel accelerator concepts, a new scheme to produce very low emittance muon beams using a positron beam of about 45 GeV interacting with a thin target directly inserted in the ring chamber and conceived at INFN Frascati Laboratories in Italy was presented. This extremely challenging study is still at a very preliminary stage and now particularly focussed at the study of the interaction of the positron beam with the target and the collection and transport of the muons to the accumulator rings.

Particular attention is more and more devoted to the energy efficiency of the accelerators and their components and in reducing the carbon footprint of new accelerator facilities, particularly those requiring high beam power. Major steps are being made in the domain of high efficiency RF sources where efficiencies of up to 85% could be achieved as reported during the conference.

An industrial exhibition took place during the first three days of the conference and during the Welcome Reception on Sunday evening. Industrial exhibitors came in a record number (115 companies from 16 countries) and presented their high technology products and services to the delegates in a superb set-up and an excellent atmosphere conducive to discussions. The industrial exhibition was complemented by an extremely interesting session on Engagement with Industry that featured for the first time at IPAC panel discussions on Industry as a Career Path for Physicists and on Open Source vs Closed Source Intellectual Property in the domain of Particle Accelerators and their applications. This allowed confronting academia and industrial partners on arguments of common interest in front of a very attentive audience.

The entertainment talk about "Illuminating Antimatter: The ALPHA Antihydrogen Experiment at CERN” was certainly a highlight of the conference. Since trapping of anti-hydrogen has become possible in CERN experiments, the fundamental (and intriguing) question whether matter and antimatter obey the same laws is physics is being addressed. The talk - a very well balanced combination of technical aspects and light high spirited intermezzos - described the steps that led to the successful trapping of antimatter and provided an outlook on all the exciting studies that will still be carried out using the AD and ELENA facilities at CERN. Together with the equally exciting talk “From Niels Bohr to Quantum Computing” in the closing session this gave a wide perspective on some of the present physics challenges and applications while the other two closing talks gave an overview and perspectives for two of the physics domains for which accelerators where initially conceived: nuclear and particle physics.

The scientific programme was developed by the IPAC’17 Scientific Programme Committee (SPC). It was a truly international body with members coming 50% from Europe and 50% from Asia and North America.

The conference programme spanned four and a half days, with plenary sessions on Monday to Friday mornings, and on Thursday afternoon. All other sessions were composed of two oral sessions in parallel, followed by poster sessions at the end of each afternoon during which 1455 posters were scheduled. In total, there were 45 invited and 51 contributed oral presentations.

A special student poster session took place during registration, the day before the conference opened. Prizes awarded by the European Physical Society’s Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) for the best student posters were presented later in the week during the special awards session. The prizes went to Annalisa Romano (CERN, Geneva) and Daniel Leslie Hall (Cornell University-CLASSE, Ithaca, New York). An additional Industrial Committee Student Poster Award was to be given to three students whose work, presented in the special session for students, most incorporates criteria relative or applicable to industry. The winners were Jean-Michel Antoine Bereder (The University of Tokyo), Yumi Lee (Korea University Sejong Campus) and Hiroaki Takeuchi (The University of Tokyo).

In addition,FabrizioGuiseppeBisesto (INFN/LNF) received the EPS-AG IPAC’17 Bruno Touschek prize for his contributions to the plasma related activities underway at SPARC-LAB, exploiting the high-power laser FLAME. In particular, for his experimental work on the single shot diagnostics systems, including Electro Optical Sampling (EOS) for temporal measurement and Optical Transition Radiation (OTR) measurements for an innovative, one-shot emittance measurement.

The proceedings of IPAC’17 are now published on the JACoW site ( The processing of the electronic files of contributions prior to, during and immediately after the conference was achieved by the JACoW team. The team was composed of almost 30 persons from laboratories worldwide, many accomplishing several different tasks covering IT (setting up the computers and network), processing of contributions and transparencies, presentations management, poster session management, author reception and cross-checking of titles and authors. Thanks to the work of this dynamic team and the careful preparations and guidance of the Chief Editor Volker Schaa (GSI) a pre-press version with close to 1400 contributions was published on the last conference day. The final version, waspublished at the JACoW site just fourweeks after the conference. This is yet another impressive record set by the JACoWInternational Collaboration, which is sincerely grateful to the supervisors of the whole team, releasing them from their usual duties.

The success of IPAC’17 was due in great part to the truly excellent collaboration between the international teams of the OC and the SPC, and the LOC. Membership of the LOC, under the leadership of Mats Lindroos (ESS), included the following staff:

•HåkanDanared (ESS), Deputy LOC Chair

•Volker Schaa (GSI), Chief Editor

•Garry Trahern (ESS), Proceedings Office Coordinator

•Juliana Pranke (ESS), Project Leader and Scientific Secretary

•Caroline Prabert (ESS), Student Programme Manager

•Inga Tejedor (ESS), Technical Tours to ESS and Poster Manager

•Mikael Johansson (ESS), Presentation Manager

•Rob Yarbray (ESS), Industrial Exhibition Manager

•Roger Eriksson (ESS), Sponsoring and Industry Support

•HennoGous and Daniel Friis (ESS), Website Support

•Johan Olander (ESS), IT Manager, App and AV coordination onsite

•Søren Pape Moeller (Aarhus University), Public Lecture, Tour to ASTRID2

•SverkerWerin (MAX IV), General Support

•Ann Frisenborg Marker (DTI), Public Lecture

•Tutti Johansson Falk (MAXI IV), Public Affairs and Technical Tours to MAXIV

•DušanStric (ESS), Satellite Meeting Manager

•Alexandra Schmidli (ESS), onsite support withStudents, Posters, Sessions

•Caroline Holgersson (ESS), onsite support withStudents, Posters, Sessions

•Julia Öberg (ESS), Press

•HelleKlestrup (DIS), Overall PCO Support

•Peder Andersen (DIS), Industry Exhibitor Coordination

•RikkeBlæsberg (DIS), Visa, Registration

•Charlotte Nielsen (DIS), Accommodation

•Jørgen Nielsen (Aarhus University), Poster Police

•Heine Dølrath(Aarhus University), Poster Police

Twenty years ago the first meeting among the representatives of the three major Accelerator Conferences (Particle Accelerator Conference - PAC, European Particle Accelerator Conference - EPAC and Asian Particle Accelerator Conference - APAC) took place in Vancouver. It was the first act of a collaboration effort among the three regions that culminated in the decision to introduce a three-year cycle for the particle accelerator conferences in 2007, ten years ago, leading to the First International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC) held in Kyoto in 2010.

Today, the continuously increasing number of delegates, confirms that IPAC, at its third cycle, provides a unique occasion for an exciting and fruitful exchange of ideas across countries and domains, between younger and more experienced colleagues, between industry and research institutes.

This success builds on the participants, on their work and enthusiasm as well as on the continuous support of societies, institutes and laboratories worldwide!

The ninth IPAC will return to the Americas and take place in Vancouver, Canada.

Gianluigi Arduini (CERN), Chair of the IPAC’17 Organising Committee