Meeting of the PERLE Collaboration at Daresbury

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Participants at the Media Skills Training.

January 15th and 16th saw the evolving Collaboration on the PERLE project discussing its status and plans towards building a new class of energy recovery linac (ERL) at Orsay, at a meeting jointly organised by Daresbury (Deepa Angal-Kalinin and colleagues) and Liverpool (Max Klein). The salient features of PERLE are its high current and energy, achieved with 3 turns in a racetrack configuration, which make it the first ERL facility of 10 MW power.

The main purpose of PERLE is the demonstration and development of the underlying concept of the LHeC and FCC-eh followed by some outstanding physics experiments such as a search for dark light photons. During the meeting, various talks on new results were presented, on the PERLE project, the source, the magnets, the ERL physics, RF technology and the status of the LHeC.

Quality factor and field emission activity as functions of the accelerating gradient as obtained with the first PERLE Niobium cavity of 802MHz frequency.

The highlight (see Figure) was the presentation of brand new results on the superb performance of the first Niobium cavity at 802 MHz, which showed a quality factor Q0 much in excess of the desired 10^10 and stability up to 30MV/m before it quenched, to be compared with the gradient a bit below 20MV/m chosen for CW operation.

The board of institutes, in which ASTec, BINP Novosibirsk, CERN, Cockcroft, Liverpool, Jlab and two just merging Orsay institutes, LAL and IPN, are represented, discussed next steps towards a TDR in 2019, ways to fund PERLE at Orsay, and it called for a next meeting during the LHeC workshop at Paris/Orsay in June. Liverpool and Daresbury were very well represented with the Directors and Head of Liverpool’s Physics Department, through Daresbury’s major expertise (with ALICE and DC photocathodes – Boris Militsyn) and initial results were also presented obtained in a joint Daresbury-Liverpool-Orsay PhD studentship (Ben Hounsell).

PERLE meeting, January 15th-16th
https://indico.cern.ch/event/690826/

PERLE/LHeC/FCCeh Workshop, June 27th – 29th
https://indico.cern.ch/event/698368/