Challenges and Trends in Charged Particle Beam Diagnostics

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Almost 50 participants gathered at the Technical University of Vienna between 7 – 9 May 2014 to participate to the 3rd oPAC Topic Workshop on Beam Diagnostics. The workshop was opened with a welcome address of CIVIDEC’s CEO, Prof. Erich Griesmayer, and Ms Luisa Griesmayer who was in charge of local organization together with the EU Project TEAM. oPAC project coordinator Prof. Carsten P. Welsch then continued with a talk about the “Challenges and Trends in Beam Diagnostics” that provided an overview and motivation for the event. Dr. Peter Forck of GSI in Germany continued with a talk on “non-invasive profile monitors for heavy ion beams” before oPAC Fellows and other participants talked present their recent research achievements in this area. In the afternoon Dr. Volker Schlott, head of PSI’s beam diagnostics group, continued with an overview of “beam instrumentation for light sources and free electron lasers” that acted as basis for a series of shorter contributions in the area of light source diagnostics. The first day was completed by a session on instrumentation for medical accelerators, started with a talk by Dr. Fadmar Osmic on the new Medaustron cancer therapy facility in Vienna.

 

A comprehensive summary of beam loss monitoring technology and existing limitations by DESY’s head of the diagnostics groups, Dr. Kay Wittenburg, opened day 2 and was followed by several talks on specific monitor types and detector technologies such as diamond detectors and fibre optical sensors. The basis for the final session on current measurements at the extremes of intensity was laid by Dr. Jacques Marroncle from CEA in France. All talks are accessible through the workshop home page.

Open discussions around future R&D requirements and training needs complemented the program. An international need for focused topical workshop, such as the one organized by the oPAC consortium, was found to be missing. This would be ideal for the community for knowledge exchange and could help improve international collaboration. Also, a lack of skilled experts and training initiatives was raised as an existing concern for most large scale research infrastructures.

The workshop was part of a series of events from the oPAC network. The network is much obliged to CIVIDEC for hosting the workshop. In particular, a very special thank you to Luisa Griesmayer for the invaluable help in organizing the event.