On 17th - 21st March, Peter Williams, senior physicist in ASTeC’s accelerator physics group attended EIC14, an international workshop on accelerator science and technology for electron-ion colliders, at Jefferson Lab, Virginia, USA. http://www.jlab.org/conferences/eic2014/index.html (link opens in a new window)

An electron-ion collider is likely to be one of the future large accelerator facilities for high energy and nuclear physics. Presently, there are five proposals under active development worldwide. They are LHeC at CERN and ENC at GSI in Europe; eRHIC at BNL and MEIC at JLab in the USA; and HIAF at IMP in China. Each of these proposed facilities covers a distinct energy range and adopts either ring-ring or energy-recovery linac (ERL) - ring collider scenarios. In order to deliver high machine performance to satisfy the science needs, an array of advanced accelerator concepts and technologies has been integrated into each of the accelerator designs. However, these facility proposals share many common accelerator R&D elements, such as ERLs, beam cooling, polarized sources and polarized beams. Collaborations among the researchers working on these facility proposals are emerging and growing.

Peter co-convened the working group on superconducting RF and energy-recovery linacs, together with Ilan Ben-Zvi of Brookhaven Lab and Bob Rimmer of Jefferson Lab. With the successful operation of ALICE and Daresbury and the Jefferson lab FEL, the international community now considers this technology ready to apply to a high-energy machine such as an electron-ion collider.

Former ASTeC intense beams group physicist, Stephen Brooks (now at Brookhaven), presented the current baseline design for eRHIC as a 20 GeV, 16 pass ERL, utilizing ns-FFAG arcs, following the successful demonstration of the ns-FFAG principle in EMMA at Daresbury.

This successful workshop provided an unique opportunity to exchange information on one of the most active areas in accelerator development worldwide.