On the 3rd March the International Institute for Accelerator Applications at the University of Huddersfield held its 4th Annual Symposium on Accelerator Applications, hosted by Professor Roger Barlow. The meeting was attended by Prof Susan Smith, Dr Tim Noakes and Dr Katharine Robertson from ASTeC.
The morning session covered talks on the medical uses of accelerators, with the first talk by Professor Rob Edgecock, focussing on the development of Non-scaling Fixed Field Alternating Gradient accelerators, and in particular the EMMA accelerator designed, built and commissioned by ASTeC and Technology Department Staff at Daresbury Laboratory. The second talk by Professor Olivier Heid from Siemens Plc concerned a joint project with colleagues at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to develop the ONIAC, a compact tandem accelerator for producing ions for a wide variety of industrial applications, including those in the area of medical physics. In the third talk Professor Karen Kirkby described the new proton therapy centre being set up in collaboration between the Christie hospital and the University of Manchester.
Professors Jaap van den Berg, Susan Smith, Bob Cryan and Roger Barlow at the MEIS re-opening
After lunch a presentation was given by Professor Jaap van den Berg of Huddersfield University describing the many challenges involved in moving the Medium Energy Ion Scattering (MEIS) Facility from its original home at Daresbury to the International Institute for Accelerator Applications. Professor van den Berg particularly praised the staff at Daresbury for the assistance given both during the move and in setting up the instrument at Huddersfield. This talk was followed by a short ceremony with Professor Bob Cryan CBE (vice-chancellor of Huddersfield) and Professor Susan Smith (Head of Daresbury Laboratory and director of ASTeC) to re-open the facility. Professor Smith ‘pressed the button’ to initiate collection of data, demonstrating that the instrument is once more fully operational.
The opening ceremony was followed by a presentation from Dr Tim Noakes (ASTeC) on the MEIS technique and its many applications in the field of materials science, semiconductor device fabrication and nanotechnology. Professor Roger Webb (University of Surrey) and Professor Stephen Donnelly (University of Huddersfield) then gave presentations on the Surrey Ion Beam Centre and the MIAMI instrument at Huddersfield, which are other complementary facilities that also exploit ion beams for materials science based research.
