Call for Workshop of RF Superconducting Materials
SRF technology has reached maturity
thanks to advances in materials, fabrication and preparation techniques over the
past 20 years. The performance of bulk Nb cavities is approaching theoretical
limits. Consistent achievement of
high performance in cavities is one of the upcoming challenges. From basic manufacturing and treatment processes
such as forming, welding, and electropolishing to fundamental RF dissipation theories,
there are many issues to be further understood and explored. We also need to find ways to evolve
beyond the “bulk niobium limit” for the next generation of
accelerators.
Understanding the underlying physics
of materials, fabrication and treatment processes as well as the physics of
limiting phenomena has helped improve empirically discovered treatments. Selecting
an efficient combination of treatments has brought significant cost savings. SRF will continue to benefit from theoretical
and experimental expertise within and beyond the SRF community. Therefore it will be important to improve
the information exchange and interaction between the SRF community and labs
interested in fundamental materials research. Superconducting magnets have benefited
greatly from such broadening of interactions.
Recently Fermilab hosted the “Midwestern
SRF Materials Research Meeting”, which brought important new contributors
to interact with the SRF field. There is strong motivation in the community to organize
on a larger scale. Fermilab therefore
proposes to host a similar national workshop as a follow-up.
The goals
of the workshop are to form a coordinated SRF materials research activity, promote
inter-disciplinary studies, further expand SRF research to more universities, invite
early industry participation and strengthen the collaboration between national
laboratories and academic institutes. As such, its focus will be
different from the SRF international workshop.
The workshop will encourage further
understanding, new ideas to push the fundamental limit, and open up a new
research frontier. It will be organized in the form of invited talks and
working group discussions. Invited talks will be categorized to review talks
and topical talks. Group discussions will be divided into brief presentations
and round-table discussions. Following are the main research topics:
Fundamentals
of RF superconductivity
Material
properties of superconductor
Fabrication
of superconducting materials
Processing
of materials
Surface
Characterizations
Industrial
collaboration
The workshop will be an effort to
bring universities, labs and industries to work together to expand the scope of
the fundamental research of RF superconducting materials. The workshop will reinforce
the effort to improve the prospects for ILC. The knowledge gathered at the
workshop will benefit future projects in high energy physics, nuclear physics
and basic energy science. It should also provide an informal review for ideas,
research activities or collaborative proposals. The workshop will be held from
May 23 - 24,
2007.
Workshop scientific committee members:
Helen Edwards (Fermilab, Chair)
Alex Gurevich (Florida State
University)
Charles Reece, Peter Kneisel (Jlab)
Hasan Padamsee
(Cornell)
Chris Compton, Tom Bieler
(MSU)
Mike Pellin,
Maria Iavarone (ANL)
Bruce Strauss (DOE)
International advisors:
C. Antoine (Saclay/Fermilab/
Co-chair), W. Singer (DESY), K. Saito (KEK).
Local organizing members: C. Antoine, M. Bruce,
C. Cooper, N. Dhanaraj, H. Edwards, K. Swanson, Genfa Wu.