Accelerator Test Facility Hosts User-Oriented Research

Maury Tigner strikes a chord with accelerator scientists in his outstanding description of the science, technology, and culture of particle accelerator R&D (Physics Today, January 2001, page 36).

Tigner refers to his recommendation in the report of the high-energy physics advisory panel's subpanel on accelerator research and development to devote intellectual and monetary resources to high-energy accelerator R&D. That report was instrumental in establishing, in 1982, the Advanced Accelerator Concepts R&D Program in the Department of Energy, Office of High Energy Physics. The program has, for several years, been supporting university, industrial, and national laboratory R&D projects on advanced accelerators. For the past decade, DOE funded, among other things, the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (see http://www.atf.bnl.gov).

The ATF hosts exactly the user-oriented research that Tigner praises in the article section "Hope for the future." Fifteen graduate students have done their thesis research at the ATF since 1992, and the facility currently has 11 university users and 2 small business users. Another indication of the ATF's importance is the number of times it appears in the pages of high-impact journals such as Physical Review, Physical Review Special Topics—Accelerators and Beams, and Science. ATF users come from all parts of the US and from Russia, Japan, and Taiwan. The research covers advanced accelerator subjects, light-source science, diagnostics, lasers, and high-brightness electron sources. For nearly a decade, the facility has been a leader in accelerator-based particle and light-source research. I would like to think that the Orion project at SLAC, due to come on line in a few years, was inspired at least in part by the ATF.