FREIA Laboratory

FREIA has a highly qualified team of over 30 researchers, engineers, PhD students and postdocs. The FREIA Laboratory was founded in 2011 and the experimental hall is situated next to the Ångström Laboratory.

Accelerator physics in Uppsala started in the late 1940s and since then it has grown into a valuable part of the academic environment. At the FREIA Laboratory physicists and engineers work on the development of particle accelerators, light generation by charged particles and on other scientific instruments. Particle accelerators are essential to enable research in high energy physics, materials science and life sciences. Think of the ATLAS and CMS detectors at CERN served by the LHC particle accelerator or X-ray spectrometers and monochromators for synchrotron radiation as at the MAX IV Laboratory in Lund, which is dependent on an electron accelerator producing the synchrotron light.

Superconducting devices such as radio frequency cavities and magnets are important components of state-of-the-art instrumentation. Radio frequency cavities are used to accelerate charged particles. The FREIA Laboratory is equipped with high power RF sources and dedicated diagnostics equipment, a helium liquefier, 2 K cryostats, vacuum systems, control electronics, and radiation protected areas (more than 50 m2 in total) housed in a 1000 m2 experimental hall. The horizontal cryostat, named HNOSS is currently used for the development and test of superconducting components for the linear accelerator at the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund.

The name FREIA is an acronym for Facility for Research Instrumentation and Accelerator Development.

From Instruments to Discoveries at FREIA

Galileo's aphorism “Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so” echoes the research vision of the Instrumentation and Accelerator Physics Program. We develop state-of-the-art instrumentation in the fields of accelerators and lasers, and use photons and charged particles to study physical systems ranging from condensed matter physics to quantum states of light. We are about 30 people working along 3 research lines:

• Accelerators & Instrumentation
• FREIA laser laboratory & X-ray photon sources
• Ultrafast materials science