 An Oak Ridge employee on the SPS beamline |
|
| Hadron Colliders | |
|---|---|
| Intersecting Storage Rings | CERN, 1971–1984 |
| Super Proton Synchrotron | CERN, 1981–1984 |
| ISABELLE | BNL, cancelled in 1983 |
| Tevatron | Fermilab, 1987–present |
| Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider | BNL, operational since 2000 |
| Superconducting Super Collider | Cancelled in 1993 |
| Large Hadron Collider | CERN, 2009– |
| Very Large Hadron Collider | Theoretical |
The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a 6.9 km long[1] particle accelerator at CERN. The SPS was designed by a team led by John Adams, director-general of what was then known as Laboratory II. Originally specified as a 300 GeV accelerator, the SPS was actually built to be capable of 400 GeV, an operating energy it achieved on the official commissioning date of 17 June 1976. However, by that time, this energy had been exceeded by Fermilab, who reached an energy of 500 GeV on 14 May of that year.
History
The SPS has been used to accelerate protons and antiprotons, electrons and positrons (for use as the injector for the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP)), and heavy ions. Most notably, as a proton–antiproton collider (as such it was called SppS) from 1981 to 1984, its beams provided the data for the UA1 and UA2 experiments, which resulted in the discovery of the W and Z bosons. These discoveries lead to a Nobel Prize for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984.
The SPS is now used as the final injector for high-intensity proton beams for the Large Hadron Collider, which began preliminary operation on 10 September 2008, accelerating protons from 26 GeV to 450 GeV. Operation as injector will still allow continuation of the ongoing fixed-target research program, where the SPS is used to provide 400 GeV proton beams for a number of active fixed-target experiments, notably COMPASS, NA48 and NA61/SHINE. The SPS will also be used to produce a neutrino stream to be detected at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory, 730 km from CERN.
The SPS has served as a test bench for new concepts in accelerator physics. In 1999 it served as an observatory for the electron cloud phenomenon.[2] In 2003, SPS was the first machine where the Hamiltonian resonance driving terms were directly measured.[3] And in 2004, experiments to cancel the detrimental effects of beam encounters (like those in the LHC) were carried out.[4]
SPS upgrade: The Super-SPS
It has been proposed that the Large Hadron Collider will require an upgrade to considerably increase its luminosity by 2015. This would require upgrades to the entire linac/pre-injector/injector chain, including the SPS. The improvements to the SPS would most likely focus on increasing the extraction energy of the Super-SPS up to 1 TeV [5].
Notes and references
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