A prototype to slash use of energy

A EUROPEAN first was achieved by scientists at Warrington’s Daresbury Laboratory when they used a prototype facility to demonstrate how new accelerators could use a fraction of the energy required using conventional methods.
The team used ALICE – Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments – to demonstrate energy recovery at 11 million volts.
This potentially paves the way for new accelerators which could dramatically reduce the requirement for energy.
ALICE’S superconducting linear accelerator accelerated electrons to 99.9 per cent of the speed of light, creating a beam with a total energy of 11 million electron volts. This was the first time the ALICE beam had been successfully transported around the entire circuit.
ALICE is operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and is a world class prototype designed to open the way for advances in a range of exciting accelerator science applications.
It is the first accelerator in Europe to use the energy recovery process which captures and re-uses the initial beam energy after each circuit. At the end of the circuit its energy is extracted for continued use before being safely discarded at an extremely low energy.
Susan Smith, head of the Accelerator Physics Group at Daresbury, said: “Energy recovery means a massive saving of power or alternatively, for the same power usage, light sources and colliders of unprecedented power and intensity.
“The ALICE team have been working tremendously hard to demonstrate energy recovery and when we did this in the small hours of the morning, it felt like Christmas had come early.”