The ESS accelerator will be the world's most powerful proton accelerator. It will push the boundaries for accelerator technology.
Here are the key challenges of the accelerator: - The high beam currents required from the ion source
- The ability to feed the power from the RF system into the super conducting accelerating cavities
- To carefully control the beam so that virtually no particles are lost. Uncontrolled beam losses must be kept below 1 Watt per meter in order to secure that the facility can be serviced hands on, rather than by remote handling
ESS target station:
In the ESS target station, the protons bombard a target of liquid mercury. Liquid mercury is the best known target material for a pulsed neutron source - one important reason for this is, that it is both a target material and a coolant at the same time. Each target station will contain about one cubic metre of mercury, which will be able to serve the facility for its entire lifetime.
ESS instruments:
The ESS will offer an unprecedented jump of two orders of magnitude in the instantaneous peak flux compared to the leading neutron sources existing today. This calls for challenging developments in detector technology, data storage and visualisation capability and the use of powerful simulation and software tools to turn these data into understanding.
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Supported by the EU through FP5 and FP6