News

EuPRAXIA is the first European project that develops a dedicated particle accelerator research infrastructure based on novel plasma acceleration concepts and laser technology.

During the Conference EuNPC2022, which was held in Santiago de Compostela from 24 to 28 October 2022, was taking place the meeting of the Nuclear Physics Division (NPD) of the European Physical Society (EPS).

High level fellowships will carry out an interdisciplinary and cross-sector plasma accelerator research and training program for the new EuPRAXIA research infrastructure. The EuPRAXIA Doctoral Network (EuPRAXIA-DN) is a new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network (MSCA-DN) offering 12 high-level fellowships between universities, research centres and industry that will carry out an interdisciplinary and cross-sector plasma accelerator research and training program. The network will start on 1 January 2023 and benefit from more than 3.2 M€ of funding over its 4-year duration. Several tens of thousands of particle accelerators are in use today with varied applications in research, industry, medicine and other fields. Yet accelerator usage could be much more widespread, were it not limited by cost and size constraints, especially in hospitals, universities, and small and medium size companies. This would enable ground-breaking applications and innovations on a much larger scale. A possible solution to this bottleneck is the development of more compact – and consequently more cost-efficient – accelerator technologies, a strategy that has been investigated in the past two decades bringing forth plasma accelerators as one of its most promising candidates. EuPRAXIA is the first European project that develops a dedicated particle accelerator research infrastructure based on novel plasma acceleration concepts and laser technology. It focuses on the development of electron accelerators and underlying technologies, their user communities, and the exploitation of existing accelerator infrastructures in Europe. It was accepted onto the ESFRI roadmap for strategically important research infrastructures in June 2021 as a European priority.   Expected …

The first commissioning test of QUAX has been successfully performed at LNF. The first data taking, 120 minutes long, of the QUAX@LNF (QUaerere AXions) was conducted last week at the COLD laboratory. QUAX is an experiment devoted to the search of dark matter in the form of axions.

The activity of the Beam Test Facility (BTF) of the Frascati National Laboratory included two operating slots (test beams) to test, for the first time, as many experimental apparatuses born in two distinct INFN collaborations and Chinese scientific and government institutes.

On June 2, the second module of the RICH detector (Ring Imaging Cherenkov) was installed in the CLAS12 spectrometer at the Jefferson Laboratory in the USA. This marked the completion of an adventure lasting more than 10 years, which started in 2011 when the physicists of the Frascati National Laboratories proposed the construction of a detector allowing the identification, in energy zones not otherwise accessible, of particles with the “strange” quark s (K mesons). This to permit the CLAS12 experiment to broaden the research field on the structure of the nucleon and the role that quarks and gluons play in it.

The SPARC_LAB research team at the Frascati National Laboratory has recently demonstrated that the plasma-based acceleration technique allows to obtain an high-quality particle beam, comparable to the beams produced in traditional accelerators.

TEX (TEst stand for X-band) is the new infrastructure at LNF, co-funded by the LATINO project, devoted to the radiofrequency (RF) in X-band and, in general, to the development of all the technologies and systems related to a particle accelerator.

LNF program Summer Students 2022 is an opportunity dedicated to undergraduate or graduate students to carry out research activity in an experimental group of Frascati National Laboratory.

Gemma Costa’s PhD thesis, “Design study of plasma targets for laser-driven wakefield acceleration experiments”, has been selected as one of the winners of the “Francesco Resmini” National Prize for the year 2021. The prize is awarded to PhD students with a thesis in the field of Accelerator Physics and New Technologies.