The Accelerators and Beam Physics Group within the Beams Department (BE-ABP) provides the expertise for studying and understanding the beam physics requirements throughout the entire CERN Accelerator Complex and for future upgrades or new projects. This is achieved through theoretical, numerical and experimental studies covering linear and nonlinear optics and beam dynamics, halo generation and collimation, coherent and incoherent collective effects.
The Group is responsible for:
- the design, construction and development of hadron sources, for their maintenance, validation and operation.
- providing input and support to accelerator operations, contributing to machine supervision, coordination and machine development studies.
- recommending settings and devising scenarios in order to optimise accelerator performance, proposing novel beam manipulation concepts, specifying and validating new installations for aspects related to aperture, alignment and impedance.
- maintaining optics repositories and models for the circular and linear accelerators and the transfer lines for high intensity space charge dominated low energy beams.
- the conception, study and development of new acceleration techniques, in particular plasma wakefield acceleration, for the design of future circular and linear colliders such as FCC, CLIC, Muon Collider, for accelerators to support the exploration of Physics Beyond Colliders, and for accelerators with applications in medicine and industry.
- coordinating and supporting the operation of the AWAKE and CLEAR accelerator test facilities for the development of new acceleration, beam manipulation and measurement concepts.
- the development, deployment, maintenance, support and exploitation of accelerator physics computer codes using state of the art computing algorithms and resources in order to fulfil the needs related to the operation and upgrade of CERN accelerators, and the design of future accelerators.
The group is also strongly involved in teaching activities (CAS, JUAS, USPAS, CERN High School Teachers Programmes, CERN Summer Student Programme), and collaborates with universities across the world for the education and training of the next generation of accelerator physicists.