Los Alamos National Laboratory
A Department of Energy / University of California Laboratory
CONTACT: John Webster, 505-667-5543, [email protected]
LOS ALAMOS TO BUILD POWERFUL ACCELERATOR FOR DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY MATERIALS RESEARCH FACILITY
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Oct. 26, 1998 -- Los Alamos National Laboratory will build a half-mile-long linear accelerator for the Spallation Neutron Source, a $1.3 billion facility that will produce the most intense pulsed neutron beam in the world.
The facility, which will be located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is a collaborative project involving five Department of Energy national laboratories. When operational, it will be used for a wide range of materials research and neutron scattering experiments.
Roger Pynn, director of the Los Alamos Neutron Scattering Center (LANSCE), said the Laboratory would also build control and diagnostic systems to handle the beam.
"This is an important project, and it fits very well with our role of being a national center for development of high-power accelerators for defense and civilian research," Pynn said. "It will allow us to continue to develop our competency and to continue to attract top-notch young scientists."
The Laboratory is expected to receive about $30 million in funding for the project during the current fiscal year and about $350 million over the seven-year life of the design and construction phases, he said.
Within two to three months, an industrial support contractor will be selected to work with the Laboratory during the design phase. The contract announcement specified that the selected contractor will take actions to affect the local economy positively.
Spallation is a term used to describe the reaction that occurs when a high-energy particle bombards an atomic nucleus, ejecting some of its neutrons. When aimed at a sample, some of these neutrons will interact with the nuclei and bounce away at an angle. This phenomenon, called neutron scattering, can provide detailed information that cannot be learned in any other way about the structure, motion and atomic interactions of a wide range of materials.
Spallation is a term used to describe the reaction that occurs when a high-energy particle bombards an atomic nucleus, ejecting some of its neutrons. When aimed at a sample, some of these neutrons will interact with the nuclei and bounce away at an angle. This phenomenon, called neutron scattering, can provide detailed information that cannot be learned in any other way about the structure, motion and atomic interactions of a wide range of materials.
Neutron scattering research has already been valuable in the development of such products as small electric motors, plastics, lubricants, jet aircraft and high-temperature superconductors, and the
DOE has made construction of a new neutron-scattering facility a high priority.
The SNS, which involves Lawrence Berkeley, Brookhaven and Argonne national laboratories as well as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, will have an ion source that produces negative hydrogen ions, accelerates them to 2.5 million electron volts and delivers them to the linear accelerator, or linac.
The linac will accelerate the hydrogen ions to one billion electron volts and transfer them to an accumulator ring, where they will be bunched and intensified for delivery onto a mercury target to produce the pulsed neutron beam, which is then aimed at the target samples.
Pynn said the accelerator for the new facility will look a lot like the existing half-mile-long linac that has been in operation at Los Alamos since the early 1970s.
"I like to show a picture of our facility and then point out that the difference between the two of them is that here, the sky is blue," he joked.
The main difference is that the number of neutrons produced by the SNS will be five times that of the existing facility at LANSCE, but Pynn said he expects the Laboratory's facility to continue to be attractive.
For one thing, he said, the type of research instrumentation can easily make up for such a difference in source intensity. He also said the geographical location would make the Los Alamos facility more attractive for some researchers in the western United States and said the Laboratory will continue to have a defense-related research role that the SNS will not have.
"There's plenty of room for more than one facility, given the importance and usefulness of neutrons in research and the demand for them in the research community," he said.
Pynn said the project participants recognize that sharing the responsibility for planning and building a large research facility among five laboratories will be challenging, but he said the challenge is exciting because such collaborations may become the model for major scientific projects in the future.
When completed in 2005, the SNS will provide users from federal laboratories, universities and private industry with a powerful new tool to study the properties of materials ranging from liquids to plastics to composites to metals.
More information about the facility is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.ornl.gov/sns. Information about work on the project at Los Alamos is available at http://sns.atdiv.lanl.gov.
For more Los Alamos news releases, visit World Wide Web site http://www.lanl.gov/external/news.releases.
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