Everything about The Super Proton Synchrotron totally explained
The
Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a
particle accelerator at
CERN. Originally specified as a 300
GeV proton machine, the SPS was actually built to be capable of 400GeV, 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
May 14 of that year.
The SPS was designed by a team led by CERN director-general of what was then known as Laboratory II, Sir
John Adams.
The SPS has also been used to accelerate
antiprotons,
electrons and
positrons (for use as the injector for CERN's
LEP electron-positron collider) and
heavy ions. Its finest hour was undoubtedly as a proton-antiproton collider (as such it was called
) from
1981 to
1984, when its beams provided the data for the
UA1 and
UA2 experiments, which resulted in the discovery of the
W and Z bosons, earning a
Nobel Prize for
Carlo Rubbia and
Simon van der Meer in 1984.
Now the SPS is used to provide 400 GeV protons beams for a number of active
fixed-target experiments, notably
COMPASS and
NA48.
The SPS is to be used as the final pre-injector for high-intensity proton beams for CERN's
Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operation in 2008, accelerating protons from 26GeV to 450GeV. Operation as pre-injector will still allow continuation of the ongoing fixed target research program. 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 an ideal testbench for the new concepts in accelerator physics. It served as an observatory for the electron cloud phenomena in 2000. A few years later, in 2003, SPS was the first machine where the Hamiltonian
resonance driving terms were directly measured. In 2004, experiments to cancel
the detrimental effects of beam encounters (like those in the LHC) were
carried out using a wire.
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 will need
an upgrade in all the pre-injector chain, including the SPS.
The most rewarding improvement will consist on increasing the
extraction energy of the Super-SPS up to 1 TeV .
Notes and references
Further Information
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