Session L08: Particle Beams for Fundamental Science

Outlook and progress of the Electron Ion Collider design and construction

The EIC, which is being designed by BNL, JLab and other partners, will be a particle accelerator that collides electrons with protons and nuclei to produce snapshots of those particles' internal structure. It will collide polarized high-energy electron beams with hadron beams with luminosities up to 10^34cm^{-2}s^{-1} in the center-of-mass energy range of 20-140 GeV. The electron beam, employed as a probe, will reveal the arrangement of the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of nuclei. The EIC will allow us to study the "strong nuclear force", the role of gluons in the matter within and all around us, and the nature of particle spin. This talk will describe the outlook and the progress of the Electron Ion Collider design and construction at Broohaven National Lab.   

FCC-ee Higgs and Electroweak Factory - Design Progress and Outlook

Although, with the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model of particle physics has been all but completed, numerous important questions of fundamental physics remain yet unanswered, longing for novel high energy physics experiments at higher intensities and energies. With a circumference of approximately 91 km the Future Circular electron-positron Collider, FCC-ee, is being designed to enable high energy physics experiments from the Z-pole up to above the top-pair-threshold, corresponding to center-of-mass energies from 91.2 to 365 GeV. Thanks to its flexibility, the FCC-ee would allow performing diverse lepton collision experiments at unprecedented precision, spanning over a wide parameter range. The FCC-ee combines state-of-the-art accelerator technologies with novel concepts while incorporating the experience from 60 years of lepton storage rings and collider physics. Its design is currently being shaped to exceed past and current production rates of heavy elementary particles (Z, W, H, t, b, tau, ...) by at least one order of magnitude at all operation stages. Therefore, the FCC-ee has unique potential of being the world-leading facility for accelerator science and high energy physics over the next decades. With a possible project approval date in 2028, first particle collisions could occur in the mid 2040s. This talk will review the FCC-ee accelerator design and related technology R&D, following the FCC Feasibility Study "mid-term review" by the CERN Council in early 2024.   

The LBNF/DUNE complex for neutrino science

The Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) provides the underground detector caverns, the beamline to deliver a 1.2MW proton beam, and a target station to produce neutrinos for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).  A mile underground, caverns are being excavated and outfitted at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.  The beamline facility and an additional “near detector” facility will be constructed on the Fermilab site in Illinois.  DUNE will make precision neutrino oscillation physics measurements and will be sensitive to neutrinos from supernova bursts, nucleon decay, and beyond-standard-model physics.   

Promise and challenges for plasma-based accelerators for science applications

Plasma-based accelerators, powered either by lasers or charged particle beams, are able to sustain ultra-high accelerating gradients, orders of magnitude higher than conventional metallic structures, enabling compact accelerators. In addition, plasma accelerators naturally accelerate ultra-short (femtosecond) beams, a fraction of the plasma wavelength. Hence plasma-based accelerators are of interest for applications that require compactness and high peak beam currents. Using triggered injection techniques, generation of electron beams from the background plasma can yield beams with sub-micron normalized transverse emittances and, therefore, high beam brightness. These beam characteristics make plasma accelerators attractive for a variety of applications, including future linear colliders and light sources. In this talk I will review recent advances and research directions in the field of plasma accelerators, as well as the challenges for realizing applications of this accelerator technology.