BCMT personnel work on a superconducting quadrupole magnet for the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. Berkeley Lab plays multiple roles in the multi-institutional collaboration that built these challenging magnets.
Berkeley Lab has driven the development of high-field superconducting accelerator magnets for decades through a vertically integrated approach that includes expertise in materials, design, and analysis, fabrication, diagnostics, and testing. Researchers have explored a number of design concepts, including
- The traditional cosine-theta at the heart of all colliders to date
- The common-coil winding that provides two apertures for hadron colliders
- Block-coil designs
- And most recently, stress-managed designs like canted cosine theta.
A vital part of BCMT’s R&D infrastructure is a cabling machine that weaves multifilamentary superconducting wire into the flat, keystoned “Rutherford style” cable typically used in superconducting accelerator magnets.
They have achieved record-breaking fields with each design, and their work has been closely followed and emulated by research groups worldwide for decades. The research has wide applications in science, spurring developments in related areas such as superconducting undulators and electron cyclotron resonance magnets.
BCMT is a leading participant in the U.S. Magnet Development Program (USMDP), contributing to all research components and taking leadership in areas such as modeling and analysis, magnet diagnostics, and hybrid magnet integration. A world-class research group in advanced accelerator magnet technology includes the broad expertise of scientists, engineers, and technical staff.
