Wednesday 1 June 2016 

Speaker: Dr Graeme Burt (Lancaster University)


Title: "LHC upgrades and the future of accelerators" 

Abstract: The LHC run to date has been very successful but future discoveries are likely to need higher luminosities than currently available. CERN has initiated the HL-LHC project which will upgrade the luminosity to deliver 250 fb-1 per year after 2025. This will involve a major upgrade of the interaction region as well as collimation and power supplies. The HL-LHC-UK project is the UK's contribution to this accelerator luminosity upgrade and will deliver key components to the machine. After the LHC era future discoveries will likely need new technologies to increase the reach of accelerators, like plasma or dielectric acceleration. The AWAKE project at CERN is a test bed for proton driven plasma wakefield acceleration and will use the SPS beam in a 10 m Plasma column to accelerate an electron beam from 20 MeV to 20 GeV. In addition in the UK the VELA/CLARA accelerator will allow testing of high gradient acceleration of electrons using THz driven dielectric structures and electron driven plasmas.