At Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, first positrons have been successfully produced at a test source for CERN’s proposed next-generation particle collider, which could succeed the Large Hadron Collider. The source, installed at the X-ray free electron laser SwissFEL, uses new technologies including high-temperature superconducting magnets to achieve a high yield of positrons. The achievement shows the feasibility of the positron-source concept and marks an important milestone in developing the technologies needed for electron-positron colliders.
In Brief:
- A test source installed at SwissFEL at PSI has successfully produced the first positrons for CERN’s Future Circular Collider (FCC).
- A major technical challenge facing electron-positron colliders is producing and capturing enough positrons
- The source uses new technologies such as high-temperature superconducting magnets to achieve markedly higher positron yields, required for the FCC.
In a bunker underground at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Aargau, Switzerland, positrons have now been generated at the proof-of-principle test source. “These are the first positrons for the Future Circular Collider project, so it’s an important milestone,” says Paolo Craievich. The physicist from the PSI Center for Accelerator Science and Engineering co-leads the PSI Positron Production project, known as P³, together with Riccardo Zennaro.
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) is a proposed 91-km particle accelerator, currently under study as a possible successor to the Large Hadron Collider in the 2040s. Housed in a tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border region near CERN at an average depth of 200 metres, the collider will smash electrons into positrons – their antiparticles. This will open new paths for exploring fundamental questions about the nature of the universe that lie beyond the reach of current colliders.
One of the collider’s major technical challenges is producing enough positrons and efficiently collecting them into a beam – something existing technologies cannot yet do on the scale required. Researchers at PSI have therefore spent the past five years developing a more powerful positron source, now installed at SwissFEL.
Read more on the PSI website
Image: The first positrons were successfully produced at a proof-of-principle source at SwissFEL at PSI. Now that the concept has been shown to work, researchers will scale up positron yield to the levels required for the Future Circular Collider at CERN.
Credit: © Paul Scherrer Institute PSI/Mahir Dzambegovic