Over the last several years the Center's activities have expanded greatly in breadth, depth, and scope. Originally chartered as the Exploratory Studies Group in 1985, it is now organized as a divisional center in AFRD to help meet the technical challenges of major facilities and initiatives and to generally enhance Berkeley Lab’s capabilities in particle- and photon-beam research. Here are some of the major thrusts of the Center's work, most of which involve more than one of its groups and, quite often, colleagues elsewhere.

High Energy Physics from the Present Day through the Long Term

High-energy physics has always been a major focus of the Center's activities. Contributions range from support of presently operating accelerator facilities such as the Tevatron and PEP-II to the development of new initiatives and advanced accelerator concepts.

The Center provides leadership for — and makes significant contributions to — major high-energy-physics initiatives of the near and medium term future. One is the Large Hadron Collider (in both its initial version and planning for an eventual upgrade). Another is the International Linear Collider, especially the damping rings. The goal is for LBNL to have lead responsibility for the accelerator physics, engineering design, construction, and commissioning of these extraordinarily challenging rings.

Beam instrumentation and radiofrequency beam manipulations are longtime strengths of the Center, and are applied to both near- and long-term needs of high-energy physics. A major 2006 accomplishment was completion of the R&D phase of the prototype bunch-by-bunch luminosity monitor for the Large Hadron Collider. It has to give 1% resolution of the luminosity of bunches only 25 nanoseconds apart and survive intense radiation. Engineering of the final version is underway.

Looking ahead to long-term HEP objectives, the Center continues its leadership role in R&D for a muon collider/neutrino factory. This work evaluates feasibility of technical approaches to an advanced muon storage ring to support research in neutrino science. A high-intensity muon storage ring is generally viewed as the ideal source of such neutrinos. LBNL is the lead laboratory in the Neutrino Factory and Muon Collider Collaboration, and also has key technical involvement in the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE).

A 201-MHz RF cavity for the Muon Ionization-Cooling Experiment is another recent achievement. “Cooling” the beam (making it more orderly prior to further acceleration) is both important to the success of a muon collider/neutrino factory and very challenging. Free muons are short-lived (about two microseconds in the laboratory frame of reference). By contrast, electron and ion colliders can store their beams for hours, in which time it makes millions of turns around the collider ring. A muon beam must be cooled sufficiently within a small fraction of that few microseconds—one of many technical challenges of such a collider. If a muon-based accelerator were built in the US, LBNL would desire and expect to play a major role, with responsibility for a major subsystem, such as the front end or perhaps the storage ring.

In another effort, parlaying experience with “front end” systems for the the Spallation Neutron Source into benefits to high-energy physics, we and colleagues in the Ion Beam Technology Program are beginning to study certain aspects of a proton driver for neutrino studies. These aspects include low-level radiofrequency control sysems, rebuncher cavities, and the electron cloud effect. The future scope of these studies could include end-to-end physics modeling—a capability that illustrates the ever-increasing integration of modeling and advanced computing into accelerator design.

Synergy and Spinoffs for the Basic Energy Sciences