Breakthrough will Underpin next High Luminosity Platform at LHC

Engineers and scientists, working with colleagues at CERN, have made a major contribution to a technology breakthrough that revolutionises the world of high energy particle physics. Supported by STFC and led by Lancaster University and the University of Manchester and involving the Cockcroft Institute, the UK team worked alongside experts from around the world to successfully test a new technology called ‘crab cavities’ and rotate a beam of protons for the first time. The test took place on 23 May using a beam from CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator and showed that bunches of protons could be tilted using these superconducting transverse radio-frequency cavities.

The Crab-Cavity technology revolutionises the world of high energy particle physics as the implementation of crab-cavities is critical to the delivery of the next level of energy and luminosity of the LHC, paving the way to increasing our understanding of the Higgs Boson(s) and ultimately the Universe. The UK has led the world in the development and construction of this technology and is working hard to make HL-LHC a reality.

STFC’s Executive Director of Programmes Professor Grahame Blair said: "This is a fantastic result for CERN and for all the collaborators involved. I am particularly happy that UK university teams, working with staff at STFC national laboratories and with the international community, have made such a key contribution. This demonstrates the value of our world class university-based programme in accelerator physics working alongside our detector and analysis teams in mapping out fully the structure of nature at the LHC energy scale; every bit of luminosity will count in this endeavour."

The HL-LHC, which will be commissioned after 2025, will increase the luminosity of the LHC by a factor of five to ten, significantly increasing the number of collisions over a given time period allowing researchers to observe rare processes that occur beyond the LHC’s present sensitivity level.

The team from the University of Manchester were involved in the beam dynamics modelling and understanding how to measure the crabbing, while colleagues from Lancaster/Cockcroft Institute were involved in and in many cases led, the design of a number of the subsystems and in all phases of testing from sub-systems to the final test. The main STFC contribution was in developing the cryomodule that encloses the crab cavities and keeps them cool with superfluid liquid helium.