MAS Micro Accelerator Structure Center

Project title: MAS Micro Accelerator Structure Center
Main applicant: Mathias Hamberg, FREIA
Grant amount: 7.9 million SEK for the period 2017-2019
Funder: The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research's Framing Grant to Instrument Technology and Method Development

Imagine that you could shrink large particle accelerators to meter size without losing performance and also at a fraction of the price of these huge facilities. The aim of this application is to further establish the first and only Northern European group specialized in manufacturing units for the new accelerator methods dependent on microfabrication techniques.

Accelerator physics is developing rapidly. New technologies promise quantum leaps in performance. Germany's largest research center DESY, institutes in the United States, and others, invests large sums in, for example, plasma acceleration and dielectric laser acceleration, which speaks of acceleration improvements between 10-1,000,000 times. From being something very exotic and considered with skepticism, more and more people are beginning to see these techniques as the natural next step.

Exactly what the future technology will look like is not clear. But, it is increasingly dependent on microstructure manufacturing of different types, for example, for accelerator cavities, but also for different types of impact or readout of particles in the accelerator. Manufacturing often takes place partly with lithography methods of the type used in the microchip industry which works against future easily reproducible cheap micro accelerators. I am currently leading a cooperation group for the production of accelerator structures, including Mikael Karlsson and other specialists in microstructure manufacturing and accelerator physics at Ångström Laboratory. Here is also Sweden's largest cleanroom, a leading material physics department, the FREIA accelerator physics laboratory and Sweden's largest university workshop, which gives the project good conditions.

Manufacturing micro accelerator cavities is a free niche where we establish ourselves and offer manufacturing to the most interesting projects. In this way we aim to quickly build on our skills to produce compact, high performance accelerators of the best concepts. Often manufacturing is difficult for accelerator institutions as they do not have a material physics department with all its capacity “in house”. From an entrepreneurial point of view, here is perhaps also the most interesting part where you can create spinoffs in the long term.