I had a chance to visit the world-famous INP named after. G.I.Budkera SB RAS. What I saw there, I can only show; a detailed story about the installations and about the institute itself was compiled by Elena Valerievna Starostina, a researcher at the institute.
(Total 68 photos)
Original text taken from here .
It is generally difficult to talk about INP in a nutshell for many reasons. First of all, because our Institute does not fit into the usual standards. This is not exactly an academic institute working on fundamental science, because it has its own production, which is quite similar to a mediocre plant, but in modern times a good plant. And at this plant they don’t make nails with cans, but they have technologies that simply don’t exist anywhere in Russia. Modern technologies in the most precise sense of the word, and not in the “modern for the Soviet Union of the 80s.” And this plant is our own, and not one where the owners are “out there somewhere” and we are just collecting products in a pile.
So this is by no means an academic Institute.
But not production either. What kind of production is this if the Institute considers the main product to be the most fundamental result, and all this wonderful technological filling and production is just a way to get this result?
So, it’s still a scientific institute with a fundamental profile?
But what about the fact that the BINP carries out the widest range of experiments related to Synchrotron Radiation (hereinafter SR) or free electron laser (hereinafter FEL), and these are exclusively applied experiments for dozens of our institutes? And, by the way, they have almost no other opportunity to conduct such experiments.
So this is a multidisciplinary institute?
Yes. And much, much more...
This story could begin with the history of the institute. Or from today. From descriptions of installations or people. From a story about the state of Russian science or the achievements of physics last days. And I hesitated for a very long time before choosing a direction, until I decided to tell about everything a little, sincerely hoping that someday I will write more and post this material somewhere.
So, INP SB RAS named after. G.I.Budkera or simply the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
It was founded in 1958 by Gersh Itskovich Budker, whose name at the Institute was Andrei Mikhailovich, God knows why. No, of course, he was a Jew in the USSR Jewish names were not welcomed - that's all clear. But I was not able to find out why Andrei Mikhailovich, and not Nikolai Semenovich, say.
By the way, if you hear something like “Andrei Mikhailovich said...” at the INP, it means Budker said.
He is the founder of the Institute and probably, if not for him, and if not for Siberia, we would never have had such developed accelerator physics. The fact is that Budker worked for Kurchatov, and according to rumors, it was simply cramped for him there. And they would never have allowed it to “swing” the way it did in Russia, where new institutions were just being created and new directions were opening up. And they wouldn’t have given him the Institute right away in Moscow at that age. First, they would have made him look bad at the position of head of the lab, then the deputy director, in general, you see, he would have lost his temper and left.
Budker went to Novosibirsk and from there began to invite various outstanding and not so prominent physicists. Outstanding physicists were reluctant to go into exile, so the bet was placed on the young school, which was founded immediately. The schools were NSU and the Physics and Music School at this NSU. By the way, in the Academy the tablets give the authorship of the FMS exclusively to Lavrentyev, but living witnesses of that history, who now live in America and publish their memoirs, claim that the author of the school was Budker, who “sold” the idea to Lavrentyev for some kind of yet another administrative concession.
It is known that two great people - Budker and Lavrentyev did not get along very well with each other, to say the least, and this is still reflected not only in the relations of people in Akademgorodok, but also in the writing of its history. Look at any academic exhibition taking place in the House of Scientists (DU), and you will easily see that there are almost no, say, photographs from the huge INP archive and generally little is said about the largest institute in our Academy of Sciences (about 3 thousand employees) , and the third taxpayer in the NSO. Not very fair, but that's how it is.
In a word, we owe the Institute, its achievements and its atmosphere to Budker. By the way, and production too. Once upon a time, the INP was called the most capitalist of all the institutes in the country - it could produce its products and sell them. Now it is called the most socialist - after all, all the money earned goes into a common pot and from it is distributed for salaries, contracts and, most importantly, conducting scientific experiments.
This is a very expensive matter. A change (12 hours) of operation of an accelerator with a detector can cost hundreds of thousands of rubles, and most of this money (from 92 to 75%) is earned by BINP employees. The BINP is the only institute in the world that earns money for fundamental physical research on its own. In other cases, such institutions are funded by the state, but in our country - you understand - if you wait for help from the state, you won’t die for long.
How does INP earn money? Sales of magnetic accelerator systems to other countries wishing to build their own accelerators. We can proudly say that we are definitely among the top two or three the best manufacturers acceleration rings in the world. We produce both vacuum systems and resonators. We produce industrial accelerating units that operate in dozens of areas outside our economy, helping to disinfect medical equipment, grain, products, purify the air and wastewater, well, in general, everything that no one pays attention to here. BINP produces medical accelerators and X-ray units for x-raying people, say, at airports or medical institutions. If you look closely at the labels on these scanners, you will find that they are located not only at the Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, but also very much in the capital Domodedovo. BINP makes dozens, if not hundreds of small orders for high-tech production or science all over the world. We produce accelerators and similar equipment for the USA, Japan, Europe, China, India... We built part of the LHC ring and were very successful. The share of Russian orders is traditionally low, and there is nothing we can do about it - the government does not give money, and local authorities or business owners simply do not have enough of it - usually the bill runs into millions of dollars. However, we must honestly admit that we also have ordinary Russian grants and contracts, and we are also happy about them, because the Institute always needs money.
3. A fragment of the accelerator, which is currently being produced by the Nuclear Physics Institute for the Brookhaven Laboratory (USA)
Our average salary is less than that of our neighbors, and its distribution does not always seem fair, but the majority of Iafists accept this, because they understand what they are working on and why they are refusing to increase their salaries. Each percentage placed in it means minus the days of operation of the installations. It's simple.
Yes, sometimes you have to stop them completely, and there have been such cases too. But, fortunately, they lasted only six months.
INP can afford to lead the construction of expensive luxury houses, as long as some of the apartments go to employees, send these employees on long business trips abroad, maintain one of the best ski bases in the country, where the “Russian Ski Track” is held annually (by the way, the base is now under threat of closure due to for another ridiculous construction project), maintain his own recreation center in Burmistrovo (“Razliv”), in general, he can afford a lot of things. And although every year there is talk that this is too wasteful, we are still holding on.
What about science at INP?
Science is more difficult. There are four main scientific directions of the BINP:
1. physics of elementary particles - FEP (i.e. what our world consists of at the very, very micro level)
2. physics of accelerators (i.e. devices with the help of which one can reach this microlevel (or is it better to say “nano”, following modern fashion? :))
3. plasma physics
4. physics related to synchrotron radiation.
There are several other areas at the BINP, in particular those related to nuclear and photonuclear physics, medical applications, radiophysics and many other smaller ones.
4. Installation Dayton VEPP-3. If it seems to you that this is a complete chaos of wires, then in general it’s in vain. Firstly, VEPP-3 is an installation where there is simply no space, and secondly, the shooting takes place from the side of the cable route (it is laid on top). Finally, thirdly, Dayton is one of those installations that are sometimes built into the structure of VEPP-3 and then removed, i.e. There is simply no point in creating global systems for “restoring order” here.
We have two constantly operating accelerators: VEPP-2000 (the abbreviation VEPP, which will often be encountered, means “colliding electron-positron beams”), on which two detectors operate - KMD and SND (cryogenic magnetic detector and spherical neutral detector) and VEPP -4M with KEDR detector. The VEPP-4M complex contains another accelerator - VEPP-3, where experiments related to SR are carried out (VEPP-4 also has SR, but these are new stations, they are still in their infancy, although they have been actively developing recently and one of the last candidate’s dissertations from SIshniks was defended precisely in this direction).
5. SI bunker VEPP-3, X-ray fluorescence elemental analysis station.
6. SI bunker VEPP-3, X-ray fluorescence elemental analysis station.
In addition, we have an FEL, which is directly designed to work with terahertz radiation for anyone from the outside, since the BINP has not yet come up with a “direct” purpose for it. By the way, after this excursion it became known that the head of the FEL, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Vinokurov, was elected corresponding member of the RAS.
We make our first stop here for clarification (based on tips from readers). What is an FEL or free electron laser? It’s not very easy to explain this, but we will assume that you know that in a conventional laser, radiation occurs like this: using some method, we heat (excite) the atoms of a substance to such an extent that they begin to emit. And since we select this radiation in a special way, falling into resonance with the energy (and therefore frequency) of the radiation, we get a laser. So in an FEL, the source of radiation is not an atom, but the electron beam itself. It is forced to pass by the so-called wiggler (undulator), where a lot of magnets force the beam to “twitch” from side to side in a sinusoid. At the same time, it emits the same synchrotron radiation, which can be collected into laser radiation. By changing the current strength in the wiggler magnets or the beam energy, we can change the laser frequency over a wide range, which is currently unattainable in any other way.
There are no other FEL installations in Russia. But they exist in the USA, such a laser is also being built in Germany (a joint project of France, Germany and our institute, the cost exceeds 1 billion euros.) In English, such a laser sounds like FEL - free electron laser.
8. Electron gun free electron laser
9. System for monitoring the level of water cooling the resonators on FEL
10. FEL resonators
11. This and the next two frames show the FEL, viewed from below (it is suspended “from the ceiling”).
14. Oleg Aleksandrovich Shevchenko closes the door to the LSE hall. After the limit switch from the impacted radar protection door (concrete block on the right) is triggered, the laser can begin to operate.
15. FEL control room. On the table are glasses for protection against laser radiation.
16. One of the stations on the FEL. On the right you can see optical stands, on which there are pieces of paper with burnt paper (dark spots in the center). This is a trace of FEL laser radiation
17. Rare shot. An old beam oscilloscope in the FEL control room. There are few such oscilloscopes left at BINP, but if you look you can find them. Nearby (on the left) is a completely modern digital Tektronix, but what's interesting about it?
We have our own direction in the field of plasma physics, related to the confinement of plasma (where the thermonuclear reaction should take place) in open traps. Such traps are available only at the BINP and, although they will not allow the main task of the “thermonuclear” to be achieved - the creation of controlled thermonuclear nuclear fusion, but they make it possible to make significant progress in the field of research into the parameters of this CTS.
18. The AMBAL installation is an ambipolar adiabatic trap, currently not working.
What is being done in all these installations?
If we talk about the FEC, then the situation is complicated. All the achievements of the FCH in recent years are associated with accelerator-colliders of the LHC type (ELH-C, as the whole world calls it, and LHC - Large Hadron Collider, as only we call it). These are accelerators with enormous energy – about 200 GeV (gigaelectronvolt). Compared to them, VEPP-4 at its 4-5 GeV, which has been operating for almost half a century, is an old man, where it is possible to conduct research in a limited range. And even more so VEPP-2000 with an energy of only about 1 GeV.
I will have to linger here a little and explain what GeV is and why it is a lot. If we take two electrodes and apply a potential difference of 1 volt across them, and then pass a charged particle between these electrodes, it will acquire an energy of 1 electron volt. It is separated from the more familiar joule by as many as 19 orders of magnitude: 1 eV = 1.6*10 -19 J.
To obtain an energy of 1 GeV, it is necessary to create an accelerating voltage of 1 gigavolt over the flight path of the electron. To get the energy from the LHC, you have to create a voltage of 200 gigavolts (a giga is a billion volts, 10 9 or 1,000,000,000 volts). Well, imagine further what is needed for this. Suffice it to say that the LHC (LHC) is powered by one of the French nuclear power plants located nearby.
21. VEPP-2000 accelerator – modernization of the previous VEPP-2M accelerator. The difference from the previous version is higher energy (up to 1 GeV) and realized idea so-called round buns (usually the bun looks more like a ribbon than anything else). Last year, the accelerator began operating after a long period of reconstruction.
23. Control room VEPP-2000.
24. Control room VEPP-2000. Above the table is a diagram of the accelerator complex.
25. Booster of electrons and positrons BEP for VEPP-2000
How does the INP benefit from this area? The highest accuracy of their research. The fact is that life is structured in such a way that increasingly lighter particles contribute to the birth of heavier ones, and the more accurately we know their mass-energy, the better we know the contribution to the birth of even the Higgs boson. This is what the BINP does - it gets super-accurate results and studies various rare processes, the “catching” of which requires not just a device, but a lot of cunning and dexterity from researchers. In short, with brains, what else? And in this sense, all three BINP detectors stand out well - KMD, SND and KEDR (it has no decoding of the name)
26. SND is a spherical neutral detector that allows you to register particles that do not have a charge. In the photo he is close to final assembly and getting started.
The largest of our detectors is KEDR. Recently, a series of experiments was completed on it, which made it possible to measure the mass of the so-called tau lepton, which is in every way analogous to an electron, only much heavier, and the J/Psi particle, the first of the particles where the fourth-largest quark “works.” And I’ll explain again. As is known, there are six quarks in total - they have very beautiful and even exotic names by which the particles they belong to are called (say, “charm” or “strange” particles mean that they contain charm and strange quarks, respectively):
The names of quarks have nothing to do with the real properties of different things - an arbitrary fantasy of theorists. The names given in quotation marks are accepted Russian translations of the terms. My point is that a “pretty” quark cannot be called beautiful or beautiful - a terminological error. Such are the linguistic difficulties, although the t-quark is often simply called the top quark :)
So, all particles of the world familiar to us consist of the two lightest quarks; proof of the existence of the other four is the work of colliding beam accelerators and detectors. Proving the existence of the s-quark was not easy, it meant the correctness of several hypotheses at once, and the discovery of J/psi was an outstanding achievement, which immediately showed the enormous promise of the entire method of studying elementary particles, and at the same time opened the way for us to study the processes that took place in the world during times Big Bang and what is happening now. The mass of the “gypsy” after the KEDR experiment was measured with an accuracy that is exceeded only by the measurement of the masses of an electron and a proton with a neutron, i.e. basic particles of the microworld. This is a fantastic result that both the detector and the accelerator can be proud of for a long time to come.
28. This is the KEDR detector. As you can see, it is now disassembled, this is a rare opportunity to see what it looks like from the inside. Systems are being repaired and modernized after a long period of work, which is usually called “experimental entry” and usually lasts several years.
29. This is the KEDR detector, top view.
31. Cryogenic system of the KEDR detector, tanks with liquid nitrogen used to cool the superconducting magnet of the KEDR detector (it is cooled to the temperature of liquid helium, pre-cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.)
32. In the VEPP-4M ring
In the field of accelerator physics, the situation is better. BINP is one of the creators of colliders in general, i.e. We can confidently consider ourselves one of two institutes where this method was born almost simultaneously (with a difference of a few months). For the first time, we encountered matter and antimatter in such a way that it was possible to conduct experiments with them, rather than observing this very antimatter as something amazing that cannot be worked with. We are still proposing and trying to implement accelerator ideas that do not yet exist in the world, and our specialists sometimes stay in foreign centers ready to undertake their implementation (in our country this is expensive and time-consuming). We propose new designs of “factories” - powerful accelerators that can “give birth” to a huge number of events for each revolution of the beam. In a word, here, in the field of accelerator physics, the BINP can confidently claim to be a world-class Institute that has not lost its significance all these years.
We are building very few new installations and they take a long time to complete. For example, the VEPP-5 accelerator, which was planned to be the largest at the BINP, took so long to build that it became morally obsolete. Moreover, the created injector is so good (and even unique) that it would be wrong not to use it. The part of the ring that you see today is planned to be used not for VEPP-5, but for channels for transferring particles from the VEPP-5 forinjector to VEPP-2000 and VEPP-4.
33. The tunnel for the VEPP-5 ring is perhaps the largest structure of this type at the BINP today. Its size is such that a bus could travel here. The ring was never built due to lack of funds.
34. Fragment of the Forinjector - VEPP-3 channel in the VEPP-5 tunnel.
35. These are stands for the magnetic elements of the Forinjector bypass channel - VEPP2000 (the channels are still under construction today.)
36. Room of the LINAC (linear accelerator) of the VEPP-5 Foreinjector
37. This and the next frame show the magnetic elements of the Foreinjector
39. Linear accelerator of Forinjector VEPP-5. The person on duty at the complex and the person responsible for visitors are waiting for the end of photography
40. Forinjector cooler storage, where electrons and positrons from LINAC enter for further acceleration and changing some beam parameters.
41. Elements of the magnetic system of the storage cooler. Quadrupole lens in this case.
42. Many guests of our Institute mistakenly believe that the 13th building, where the VEPP3, 4, 5 accelerators are located, is very small. Only two floors. And they are wrong. This is the road down to the floors located underground (it’s easier to do rad protection this way)
Today, the INP is planning to create a so-called c-tau (tse-tau) factory, which could become the largest project in fundamental physics in Russia in recent decades (if the megaproject is supported by the Russian Government), the expected results will undoubtedly be at the level of the best in the world. The question, as always, is about money, which the Institute is unlikely to be able to earn on its own. It is one thing to maintain current installations and very slowly do new things, another thing is to compete with research laboratories that receive full support from their countries or even from associations such as the EU.
In the field of plasma physics, the situation is somewhat more difficult. This direction has not been funded for decades, there has been a strong outflow of specialists abroad, and yet plasma physics in our country can also find something to brag about. In particular, it turned out that turbulence (vortices) of the plasma, which should destroy its stability, sometimes on the contrary , help keep it within specified boundaries.
43. Two main installations of plasma physics - GOL-3 (in the picture taken from the level of the crane beam of the building) and GDL (will be below)
44. Generators GOL-3 (corrugated open trap)
45. Fragment of the GOL-3 accelerator structure, the so-called mirror cell.
Why do we need an accelerator on plasma? It’s simple - in the task of obtaining thermonuclear energy there are two main problems: confining the plasma in magnetic fields of a tricky structure (plasma is a cloud of charged particles that strive to push apart and spread out into different sides) and its rapid heating to thermonuclear temperatures (imagine - you heat a kettle to 100 degrees for several minutes, but here it takes microseconds to reach millions of degrees). The BINP tried to solve both problems using accelerator technologies. Result? On modern TOKAMAKs, the plasma pressure to the field pressure that can be held is a maximum of 10%, at the BINP in open traps - up to 60%. What does this mean? That in TOKAMAK it is impossible to carry out the deuterium + deuterium synthesis reaction; only very expensive tritium can be used there. In a GOL-type installation it would be possible to make do with deuterium.
46. It must be said that GOL-3 looks like something created either in the distant future, or simply brought by aliens. Usually it makes a completely futuristic impression on all visitors.
Now let's move on to another plasma installation at the BINP - the GDT (gas dynamic trap). From the very beginning, this plasma trap was not focused on thermonuclear reaction, it was built to study the behavior of plasma.
50. GDL is a rather small installation, so it fits into one frame entirely.
Plasma physics also has its own dreams, they want to create new installation- GDML (m - multi-mirror), its development began in 2010, but no one knows when it will end. The crisis affects us in the most significant way - high-tech industries are the first to be cut, and with them our orders. If funding is available, the installation can be created in 4-6 years.
In the field of SI, we (I’m talking about Russia) lag behind the entire developed part of the planet, to be honest. There are a huge number of SR sources in the world, they are better and more powerful than ours. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of works are carried out on them, related to the study of everything - from the behavior of biological molecules to research in physics and chemistry solid. In fact, this is a powerful source of X-rays, which cannot be obtained in any other way, so all research related to the study of the structure of matter is SI.
However, life is such that in Russia there are only three SR sources, two of which were made here, and we helped launch one (one is located in Moscow, another in Zelenograd). And only one of them constantly works in experimental mode - this is the “good old” VEPP-3, which was built a thousand years ago. The fact is that it is not enough to build an accelerator for SR. It is also important to build equipment for SI stations, but this is something that is not available anywhere else. As a result, many researchers in our western regions prefer to send a representative “to do everything ready” rather than spend huge amounts of money on the creation and development of SI stations somewhere in the Moscow region.
55. In the VEPP-3 ring
56. This is a bird's eye view of the VEPP-4 complex or more precisely the third mezzanine floors. Right below concrete blocks rad.protection, under them - POSITRON and VEPP-3, then - a bluish room - the control room of the complex, from where the complex and the experiment are controlled.
57. “Chief” of VEPP-3, one of the oldest accelerator physicists at the BINP and the country – Svyatoslav Igorevich Mishnev
At the INP, for almost 3000 people, there are only a little more than 400 scientific workers, including postgraduate students. And you all understand that it is not a research assistant standing at the machine, and the drawings for the new accelerating rings are not made by graduate students or students either. The BINP has a large number of engineering and technical workers, which includes a huge design department, technologists, electricians, radio engineers, and... dozens of other specialties. We have a large number of workers (about 600 people), mechanics, laboratory assistants, radio laboratory assistants and hundreds of other specialties, which sometimes I don’t even know about, because no one is particularly interested in this. By the way, INP is one of those rare enterprises in the country that annually holds a competition for young workers - turners and milling operators.
62. BINP production, one of the workshops. The equipment is mostly outdated, modern machines are located in workshops that we have not been to, located in Chemy (there is such a place in Novosibirsk, next to the so-called Research Institute of Systems). This workshop also has CNC machines, they just weren’t included in the shot (this is a response to some comments on blogs.)
We are Iafists, we are a single organism, and this is the main thing at our Institute. Although it is very important, of course, that they lead the entire technological process physics. They do not always understand the details and intricacies of working with materials, but they know how everything should end and remember that a small failure somewhere on a worker’s machine will lead to a multimillion-dollar installation somewhere in our country or in the world. And therefore, some green student may not even understand the engineer’s explanations, but when asked “can this be accepted,” he will shake his head negatively, remembering exactly that he needs an accuracy of five microns on the basis of a meter, otherwise his installation is screwed. And then the task of technologists and engineers is to figure out how he, the villain, can meet his unthinkable demands, which go against everything that we usually do. But they invent and provide, and invest an incredible amount of intelligence and ingenuity.
63. The puzzled person responsible for the electrical equipment of the VEPP-4M complex, Alexander Ivanovich Zhmaka.
64. This ominous shot was filmed simply in one of the buildings of the Institute, in the same one where VEPP-3, VEPP-4 and the VEPP-5 forinjector are located. And it simply means the fact that the accelerator is working and poses some danger.
67. The world's first collider, built in 1963 to study the possibilities of using them in experiments in particle physics. VEP-1 is the only collider in history in which beams circulated and collided in a vertical plane.
68. Underground passages between the buildings of the institute
Thanks to Elena Elk for organizing the photography and detailed stories about the installations.
June 6th, 2016
60 shots | 12.02.2016
In February, as part of the days of science in the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, I went on an excursion to the Institute of Nuclear Physics. Kilometers of underground passages, particle accelerators, lasers, plasma generators and other wonders of science in this report.
Institute of Nuclear Physics named after. G.I. Budkera (BINP SB RAS) is the largest academic institute in the country, one of the world's leading centers in the field of high energy physics and accelerators, plasma physics and controlled thermonuclear fusion. The institute conducts large-scale experiments in particle physics, develops modern accelerators, intense sources of synchrotron radiation and free electron lasers. In most of its areas, the Institute is the only one in Russia.
The first devices that a visitor encounters right in the corridor of the institute are a resonator and a bending magnet with VEPP-2M. Today they are museum exhibits.
This is what the resonator looks like. Essentially it is a particle accelerator.
The installation with colliding electron-positron beams VEPP-2M began operating in 1974. Until 1990, it was modernized several times, the injection part was improved and new detectors were installed for conducting high-energy physics experiments.
A rotating magnet that deflects a beam of elementary particles to pass along a ring.
VEPP-2M is one of the first colliders in the world. The author of the innovative idea to collide colliding beams of elementary particles was the first director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the SB RAS - G. I. Budker. This idea became a revolution in high-energy physics and allowed experiments to reach a fundamentally new level. Now this principle is used all over the world, including at the Large Hadron Collider.
The next installation is the VEPP-2000 accelerator complex.
Collider VEPP-2000 - modern installation with colliding electron-positron beams, built at the BINP SB RAS in the early 2000s instead of the VEPP-2M ring, which successfully completed the physical program. The new storage ring has a wider energy range from 160 to 1000 MeV in the beam, and an order of magnitude higher luminosity, that is, the number of interesting events per unit time.
High luminosity is achieved using the original concept of round colliding beams, first proposed at the BINP SB RAS and applied at VEPP-2000. KMD-3 and SND detectors are located at the meeting points of the beams. They record various processes that occur during the annihilation of an electron with its antiparticle - a positron, such as the birth of light mesons or nucleon-antinucleon pairs.
The creation of VEPP-2000 using a number of advanced solutions in the magnetic system and beam diagnostic system in 2012 was awarded the prestigious Prize in the field of accelerator physics. Wexler.
Control room VEPP-2000. The installation is controlled from here.
In addition to computer equipment, such instrument cabinets are also used to monitor and control the installation.
Everything is clearly visible here, with light bulbs.
After walking at least a kilometer through the corridors of the institute, we arrived at the synchrotron radiation station.
Synchrotron radiation (SR) occurs when high-energy electrons move in a magnetic field in accelerators.
The radiation has a number unique properties and can be used for substance research and technological purposes.
The properties of SR are most clearly manifested in the X-ray range of the spectrum; accelerators-sources of SR are the brightest sources of X-ray radiation.
Except purely scientific research,SI is also used for applied problems. For example, the development of new electrode materials for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles or new explosives.
In Russia there are two centers for the use of SR - the Kurchatov SR Source (KISS) and the Siberian Center for Synchrotron and Terahertz Radiation (SCST) of the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS. The Siberian Center uses SR beams from the VEPP-3 storage ring and from the VEPP-4 electron-positron collider.
This yellow chamber is the "Explosion" station. It studies the detonation of explosives.
The center has a developed instrumentation base for sample preparation and related research.The center employs about 50 scientific groups from institutes of the Siberian Scientific Center and from Siberian universities.
The installation is very densely loaded with experiments. Work does not stop here even at night.
We move to another building. Room with iron door and the inscription “Do not enter radiation” - we are here.
Here is a prototype of an accelerator source of epithermal neutrons suitable for the widespread introduction of boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) into clinical practice. Simply put, this device is for fighting cancer.
A boron-containing solution is injected into the human blood, and boron accumulates in cancer cells. Then the tumor is irradiated with a stream of epithermal neutrons, boron nuclei absorb the neutrons, and nuclear reactions with high energy release occur, as a result of which the diseased cells die.
The BNCT technique has been tested in nuclear reactors that have been used as a source of neutrons, but the introduction of BNCT into clinical practice in them is difficult. Charged particle accelerators are more suitable for these purposes because they are compact, safe and provide best quality neutron beam.
Below are some more pictures from this laboratory.
One gets the complete impression that he has entered the workshop of a large factory like .
Complex and unique scientific equipment is developed and manufactured here.
Separately, it should be noted the underground passages of the institute. I don’t know exactly how long their total length is, but I think a couple of metro stations could easily fit here. It is very easy for an ignorant person to get lost in them, but employees can get from them to almost any place in a huge institution.
Well, we ended up at the “Corrugated Trap” installation (GOL-3). It belongs to the class of open traps for confining subthermonuclear plasma in an external magnetic field.Plasma heating at the installation is carried out by injection of relativistic electron beams into a previously created deuterium plasma.
The GOL-3 installation consists of three parts: the U-2 accelerator, the main solenoid and the output unit. U-2 pulls electrons from the explosive emission cathode and accelerates them in a strip diode to an energy of the order of 1 MeV. The created powerful relativistic beam is compressed and injected into the main solenoid, where a high level of microturbulence arises in the deuterium plasma and the beam loses up to 40% of its energy, transferring it to plasma electrons.
At the bottom of the unit is the main solenoid and output assembly.
And on the top is the U-2 electron beam generator.
The facility conducts experiments on the physics of plasma confinement in open magnetic systems, the physics of collective interaction of electron beams with plasma, the interaction of powerful plasma flows with materials, as well as the development of plasma technologies for scientific research.
The idea of multi-mirror plasma confinement was proposed in 1971 by G. I. Budker, V. V. Mirnov and D. D. Ryutov. A multi-mirror trap is a set of connected mirror cells that form a corrugated magnetic field.
In such a system, charged particles are divided into two groups: those captured in single mirror cells and those in transit, caught in the loss cone of a single mirror cell.
The installation is large and, of course, only the scientists working here know about all its components and parts.
Laser installation GOS-1001.
The mirror included in the installation has a reflection coefficient close to 100%. Otherwise it will heat up and burst.
The last one on the excursion, but perhaps the most impressive, was the Gas Dynamic Trap (GDT). To me, a person far from science, she reminded me of some spaceship in the assembly shop.
The GDL installation, created at the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1986, belongs to the class of open traps and serves to contain plasma in a magnetic field. Experiments on the topic of controlled thermonuclear fusion (CTF) are conducted here.
An important problem of CTS based on open traps is thermal insulation of plasma from the end wall. The fact is that in open traps, unlike closed systems such as a tokamak or stellarator, plasma flows out of the trap and enters the plasma receivers. In this case, cold electrons emitted under the action of a plasma flow from the surface of the plasma receiver can penetrate back into the trap and greatly cool the plasma.
In experiments to study the longitudinal confinement of plasma at the GDT installation, it was experimentally shown that the expanding magnetic field behind the plug in front of the plasma collector in the end expander tanks prevents the penetration of cold electrons into the trap and effectively thermally insulates the plasma from the end wall.
As part of the experimental GDL program, Full time job on increasing plasma stability, reducing and suppressing longitudinal losses of plasma and energy from the trap, studying the behavior of plasma in different conditions operation of the installation, an increase in the temperature of the target plasma and the density of fast particles. The GDL installation is equipped with the most modern means plasma diagnostics. Most of them were developed at the BINP and are even supplied under contracts to other plasma laboratories, including foreign ones.
Lasers are everywhere at the Nuclear Physics Institute and here too.
This was the excursion.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Council of Young Scientists of the BINP SB RAS for organizing the excursion and to all the BINP employees who showed and told us what and how the institute is currently doing. I would like to express special gratitude to Alla Skovorodina, public relations specialist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS, who directly participated in the work on the text of this report. Also thanks to my friend Ivan
The G.I. Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics SB RAS is the largest academic institute in Russia, one of the world's leading centers in the field of high energy physics, physics and technology of accelerators, sources of synchrotron radiation and free electron lasers, plasma physics and controlled thermonuclear fusion. In many of its areas, the BINP SB RAS is the only center in Russia.
The Institute was created in 1958 in the Novosibirsk Academgorodok on the basis of the Laboratory of New Acceleration Methods of the Institute of Atomic Energy, headed by G. Budker, headed by I. Kurchatov. Academician G. Budker was the founder and first director of the institute. Its director Alexander Skrinsky told the Interfax-Siberia agency about what problems the Institute is working on today.
- Alexander Nikolaevich, how do you see the prospects of the institute in the context of the changes that are currently taking place in academic science?
- For now, we can say that our funding for next year will not change, remaining at the level of this year. Historically, our institute has had more of an extrabudgetary component through contracts, participation in collaborations, and so on. For example, out of 2 billion rubles of the Institute’s total budget for 2013, direct budget funding amounted to about 800 million rubles. The rest comes to us because we do what other research centers need, mainly foreign ones, although there are also Russian orders. And we do applied things, as they say, for the national economy - medicine, security (screening systems at airports), various industries, both for Russia and for foreign consumers. We try, of course, that our applied developments are not some kind of separate activity, but flow naturally from what we do in the field of fundamental science, because for us the central line is particle physics and related issues.
Fundamental physics develops only when you walk through an unfamiliar country, in a direction that has not been traveled by anyone, and do, learn something that others do not yet know at that moment. It is clear that almost always at the same time someone is working on solving the same problems, you can fall behind - but this is the second question.
Ideally, we are forced to invent and master new technologies in order to approach completely new phenomena that are in no way practical applications were not used before for the simple reason that these phenomena were not discovered.
For example, synchrotron radiation, the first artificial sources of which appeared in the middle of the last century. Since that time, the ability to generate synchrotron radiation has continued to improve, increasing its quality, brightness, intensity, shortening the wavelength, or more precisely, its regulation. We hope that in the coming years we will be able to build a new source of synchrotron radiation of the generation, as they say now, “3+”. Likewise, a laser uses high-energy electron beams. It produces coherent radiation whose frequency can be varied, and we have shown that this is possible. The first stage of the laser was launched in 2003, the second in 2009, and we hope that the third stage will be launched soon. Today, our free electron laser significantly exceeds all other sources of coherent radiation in the world in the average radiation power in the wavelength range 40-80 and 110-240 microns. At first, many said that we were doing nonsense - however, this almost always happens. Now the laser is already being used, although not in technology, but in other areas of science - biology, geology, chemistry. For example, it can be used to separate light isotopes, work with metamaterials, and so on.
- What tasks does the BINP face in fundamental science?
We want to take a very big step in increasing the luminosity (performance) of our next electron-positron collider to a relatively low energy - up to 5 GeV. The output of this collider should be about a thousand times greater than what has been achieved so far, greater even than the Large Hadron Collider. Although the collider energy will be relatively low, it will hopefully provide answers to important questions facing not only particle physics, but also cosmology. These sciences, although very different in their tools, are necessary for each other when it comes to understanding the structure of matter. There is hope that the Russian government, having once again included our collider among the scientific megaprojects that will be supported by the state, as recently announced by the Minister of Education and Science Dmitry Livanov, will be consistent in implementing this decision. The fact is that the total cost of the installation is about 16 billion rubles. By world standards, this is not so much, of which we were able to invest about 15% through contract work carried out for other centers, industry in Russia and other countries, but, of course, it is impossible to fully implement the project solely on our own.
- Will the Standard Model survive?
Speaking of the Standard Model ( modern theory structure and interactions of elementary particles - IF), two points should be distinguished: its reliability and completeness. First, about reliability.
The Standard Model has exceptionally powerful predictive power. Until now, despite many different experiments aimed at finding direct or indirect indication of the existence of deviations from the Standard Model, it has not been possible to detect these deviations at any significant level of reliability. In this sense, the Novosibirsk experiments, first of all, our new collider VEPP-2000, are a kind of outpost for testing the Standard Model - one of the greatest natural science theories of the 20th century.
However, what can be said for sure is that in its current form the Standard Model is a model that describes everything fundamental interactions, incomplete. There are phenomena in nature, for example, dark matter, dark energy, that are not described by the Standard Model, and to explain this, it (the Standard Model) needs to be expanded. There is a huge amount of experimental work ahead, primarily in the field of cosmology, astronomy and, of course, high-energy physics.
- How is the BINP’s work progressing in the thermonuclear direction?
Investments in the development of reactors based on open-loop plasma confinement systems, which our institute is engaged in, compared to investments in tokamaks (in which plasma is confined by an electric field in a toroidal chamber - IF) in the world are much smaller, therefore, in general, it has advanced more modestly - both plasma parameters, in terms of their proximity to thermonuclear parameters, and in terms of engineering and technological development of this approach. In principle, of course, a thermonuclear reaction can be obtained in one or another way, but the main and most difficult task– make the process of obtaining this energy commercially attractive, as well as technologically and environmentally acceptable.
From this point of view, a commercial tokamak is a very complex technology, difficult to implement in practice, and if we assume that a commercial reactor can be implemented on the basis of open plasma confinement systems, then this can be noticeably easier, cheaper and safer than a tokamak.
It is important to note that we are not the only ones working on this topic; for example, the American company Three Alpha Energy is moving in the same direction, for which we are making a batch of powerful atomic heating injectors in the megawatt range.
To what extent, in your opinion, does the result on heating and confining plasma in a gas-dynamic trap (GDT), obtained recently at the BINP, bring closer the prospect of a thermonuclear reactor based on, as they say, a “mirror cell”?
Indeed, quite recently, in November of this year, a record electron temperature of 400 electron-volts (4.5 million degrees) was achieved at the GDL installation with additional microwave (microwave) heating of subthermonuclear plasma.
This breakthrough in temperature (the previous record was about 250 electron-volts) became possible thanks to cooperation with Novosibirsk State University and the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Nizhny Novgorod) as part of a megaproject led by the outstanding German scientist Professor Manfred Thumm (Karlsruhe). Currently, only one of the sources of microwave radiation they developed has been used; with the connection of the second, we expect further progress in plasma parameters (that is, an increase in its temperature and the time of plasma retention in the trap - IF).
The result obtained is an important step on the path to thermonuclear energy - it confirms the possibility of creating neutron generators and nuclear fusion reactors based on open traps, the simplest from an engineering point of view.
- In your opinion, is a purely Russian thermonuclear project possible?
Scale and, accordingly, resource intensity similar project is such that even America does not undertake to solve this problem, relying only on internal capabilities. Neither tokamaks, nor open-loop systems. Both directions are developing as international ones.
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) under construction in France (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is the largest international project to create an experimental thermonuclear reactor in Caradas (France) - IF), for example, is already a truly global project, in which almost all the most scientifically and technologically developed countries are participating, including including Russia, USA, Japan, European countries. But also development open systems Plasma retention is also carried out within the framework of international, cooperative, rather than national projects. And the point is not even that, for example, America does not have enough money to make a thermonuclear reactor themselves. They just probably don’t want to take on the whole risk of going “alone” the whole way, not being sure of the final result.
In addition, the developments that, for example, we have at our institute, the United States does not have. Therefore, we carry out contract work for them, they use our scientific and technical potential in order to advance and get results as quickly as possible. Although we have some reserves for the future, there is no government investment in open-loop systems, and we take on foreign orders in order to be able to improve technologies and find new solutions.
- What other international projects does the institute participate in?
Participation in the CERN-LHC project, that is, the Large Hadron Collider, continues. Several dozen of our researchers take part in experiments with the ATLAS and LHCb detectors. We are taking a fairly significant part in the modernization of the accelerator complex.
We are participating in the creation of a high-luminosity B-factory, an electron-positron collider with an energy level of 10–11 GeV in Japan.
In Germany, we are participating in two large projects - a short-pulse laser using high-energy, very high-energy electron beams, tens of GeV, which is being built near Hamburg. It is expected to be the world's most powerful X-ray laser.
Another major project in Germany is the FAIR project, Facility for Antiprotons and Ions Research, implemented by the Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Wickhausen near Darmstadt. This is a heavy ion collider; we have been involved in its development for about 15 years.
Serious Russian money has been invested in both projects in Germany, much more than the BINP directly receives from our state. This money is used to order equipment for both the laser and FAIR for us and a small number of Russian institutes.
Why this is done this way, and not directly - the state invests in us so that we, for example, do something for these projects, this is an unclear question.
ITER is not structured exactly like this: the Russian side supplies equipment to ITER, investing money in our institutes - in Kurchatovsky, in ours, in some others.
By the way, about the Kurchatov Scientific Center. Has the topic of a possible merger of the INP with it been finally removed from the agenda?
Talk about unification arose in the summer, when the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences was actively discussed. Then the RAS, with our participation, proposed not to change the departmental affiliation of institutes and merge different organizations in the legal sense, but to return to implementation state program on the creation of Mega Science installations.
At one time, six of them were selected, including our electron-positron collider with high luminosity at a relatively low energy.
We like the version of the state program much better, primarily because we are not only working on this project, we are also working on other work. Including on special topics. And to take all this and merge it into one thing is extremely irrational; administrative unification of everyone with everyone is wrong. I see harmful consequences in the fact that there is no leadership in science that knows everything and understands everything in all areas. Organizations that have a kind of mutual understanding can develop a certain area jointly. In this area they can interact with some organizations - applied, industrial, and in other areas - with completely different ones.
- Did any idea arise during one of the reforms, for example, to divide the INP into production and science itself?
- Of course, there were many such ideas, and they appeared at many stages. But in our production, more precisely, in the design and production complex, we make all our new equipment that cannot be bought anywhere, which we need for our fundamental research, and for applications in other fields of science, and for industrial, medical, etc. further character.
Look, our industrial science was killed or almost killed. Let's say we can disconnect our design and production part. And how will it live better than industry institutes, industry design bureaus with production on a much larger scale than we have?
We suspect, and experience shows, that we have survived and continue to be interesting both abroad and domestically, and from an applied point of view, because we have the whole chain - fundamental research, applied research and development, design capabilities and high-tech production.
- Why are the applied developments of the institute more in demand abroad than in Russia?
Until 1990, 85-90% of our products, namely industrial accelerators, went to Soviet Union. An entire cable industry was built on this, where heat-resistant insulation was needed. In subsequent years, factories lost the opportunity to buy anything new at all. Now some enterprises that survived this time have begun to develop and have begun to buy our equipment again. Every year we produce from 10 to 15 accelerators (one such machine costs from $500 thousand to $2 million). Now 20% of our consumers are Russian. There are few consumers in Kazakhstan. Of course, we are ready to do not only what we did 30 years ago, we are ready to do new things. But for this there must be orders, as there was an order, for example, from the electrical industry for the production of heat-resistant cable. Then they immediately ordered us 15 accelerators - this was around 1970. And on this, in fact, our production grew, at that time we did not have an accelerator that we could supply, there were samples, individual developments... But an accelerator operating at high parameters, with sufficiently high energy, with a power of tens and hundreds of kilowatts - there was no such thing. And moreover, it was necessary for it to work not for us, but at the factory, for people who, perhaps, do not understand anything in physics, so that it works not for a day or a month.
Many of our accelerators worked for 20 years, sometimes they ordered spare parts from us, but mostly the factories operated them themselves. Then it went abroad, mainly to China. Now there is a problem with China. The first thing they do when they get our new devices, our new cars, and not only ours, is probably to copy them as strictly as possible. It took them about 15 years to master accelerators of the ELV type, the most widespread. Now there are more accelerators working in China than ever worked in the USSR and Russia - about 50. So far they are buying accelerators both from their own manufacturers and from us - approximately one to one. After a while they will supplant us, of course, with old accelerators from China. But they are trying to enter the Indian market. It’s more difficult for them to enter Korea because we produce accelerators together with Samsung. They are used both in Korea itself and supplied to China. Generally speaking, China is big, and those who are used to our cars seem to stick with us. But this cannot last forever, we need to develop, move forward. We need, of course, a revolution in technology, some of it is planned, but so far there are almost no Russian consumers. There is no need to count on foreign consumers to finance the development; they can only buy ready-made equipment.
Let’s say that Russian leaders really care about the development of science, technology based on science, and so on. Let's assume that this is true. Nowadays they often argue like this: we (the country) are lagging behind in such and such an area of technology, due to a variety of reasons. Let's invest money there. As a rule, this is an empty matter, that is, it turns out to be a bottomless barrel, because if you do not have a qualified team that is accustomed to working and getting results, there will be no results. Or another reasoning - let's buy everything, all the technology, bring it here and produce everything that is needed. It also practically does not work, because it is almost impossible to obtain advanced technology. These are all technologies from 15-20 years ago. What they are working on abroad at the forefront, we, of course, will not be allowed to see. Therefore, it is right to support in your country those groups and organizations that are already producing results that are interesting to the world community, which have a positive history and a positive state behind them, that is, they are advanced on a global scale. And you need to invest money in such organizations; the return will be immediate and guaranteed.
In the meantime, breakthrough technologies, for example, at our institute, the same laser on electron beams, are created with the money we earned, and not because the state ordered and financed our development, or instructed us to do it, or supported our endeavor. We, realizing that this would someday be in demand in Russia, built it ourselves. The electron-positron collider VEPP-2000 was built in a similar way - we did not receive anything from the state for fundamental science in this regard. Today, the funds allocated by the state for science do not cover salaries, utilities, etc. at our Institute. It is difficult to say how the situation will develop further.
interfax-russia.ru
Institute of Nuclear Physics named after. G.I. Budkera SB RAS is an institute created in 1958 in the Novosibirsk Academic Town on the basis of the laboratory of new acceleration methods of the Institute of Atomic Energy, headed by I.V. Kurchatov. BINP is the largest institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The total number of employees of the institute is approximately 2900 people. Among the scientific staff of the institute there are 5 full members Russian Academy Sciences, 6 corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, about 60 Doctors of Sciences, 160 Candidates of Sciences. BINP has completed a fairly impressive amount of work for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
This is where it all started: VEP-1 (Counter Electron Beams)
The world's first collider, built in 1963 to study the possibilities of using them in particle physics experiments. VEP-1 is the only collider in history in which beams circulated and collided in a vertical plane.
Currently, there are two accelerators operating at the BINP SB RAS: VEPP-4 and VEPP-2000.
The electron-positron collider VEPP-2000, the development of which also began in 2000, became a kind of younger brother of the Large Hadron Collider. If the particle energy in the European collider reached 100 gigaelectronvolts per beam (total energy - 200 gigaelectronvolts), then Siberian collider exactly 100 times weaker - 2000 megaelectronvolts or 2 gigaelectronvolts.
One of the main tasks of the new collider is to maximize high accuracy measure the parameters of the annihilation of an electron-positron pair into hadrons - mesons and baryons. A positron and an electron - a particle and an antiparticle - can annihilate during collisions, turning entirely into electromagnetic radiation. However, at some energies, these collisions can generate other particles - consisting of two (mesons) or three quarks (baryons - protons and neutrons).
The internal structure of protons and neutrons is still not fully understood.
Instant cooling for feet with nitrogen.
I was told that this is currently one of the most powerful magnets in the world.
Management of VEPP-2000
The VEPP-4 accelerator complex is a unique facility for conducting experiments with high-energy colliding electron-positron beams. The VEPP-4 complex includes an injector (beam energy up to 350 MeV), a storage ring VEPP-3 (up to 2 GeV) and an electron-positron collider VEPP-4M (up to 6 GeV).
The VEPP-4M collider with the KEDR universal particle detector is designed for experiments in high-energy physics.
VEPP-4M implements a system for measuring particle energy using the resonant depolarization method with a relative error of up to 10-7, which has not been achieved in any other laboratory in the world. This technique makes it possible to measure the masses of elementary particles with extremely high accuracy.
IN last years The goal of most experiments is to precisely measure the masses of elementary particles.
In addition to high-energy physics, research using extracted beams of synchrotron radiation is carried out at the VEPP-4 complex. The main directions are materials science, the study of explosive processes, archeology, biology and medicine, nanotechnology, etc.
More than 30 Russian and foreign organizations conduct research at the installations of the VEPP-4 complex, including RAS institutes from Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, St. Petersburg, Moscow, etc., as well as foreign institutes from Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland , Spain, USA, Japan and South Korea.
The perimeter of VEPP-4m is 366 meters.
Its half rings run underground
Nuclear physics experiments are carried out at the VEPP-3 storage ring on an internal gas target, which is a gas jet (deuterium or hydrogen) of record intensity, injected directly into vacuum chamber drive.
The length of the VEPP-3 storage ring is 74.4 m, the injection energy is 350 MeV, the maximum energy is 2000 MeV
The main directions of work of VEPP-3 at present are the accumulation and injection of electrons and positrons into the VEPP-4M collider, work as a source of synchrotron radiation and experiments with an internal gas target on electron scattering on polarized deuterons.
Accumulator-cooler of the injection complex.
The GDT installation (gas-dynamic trap) is a stand for the experimental study of important physical problems associated with the confinement of thermonuclear plasma in long magnetic systems open type. Among the issues being studied are the physics of longitudinal losses of particles and energy, equilibrium and magnetohydrodynamic stability of plasma, and microinstability.
Experiments at the GDT facility provided answers to several classical questions in hot plasma physics.
Currently, the GDL installation is being modernized. The purpose of the modernization is to use powerful atomic injectors of a new generation to heat the plasma. According to calculations, such injectors make it possible to obtain record parameters of hot plasma, which will make it possible to conduct a series of experiments to study in detail the physics of plasma confinement and heating with parameters characteristic of future thermonuclear reactors.
Multi-mirror plasma trap GOL-3.
Experiments are being conducted at the GOL-3 facility to study the interaction of plasma with a surface. The purpose of these experiments is to select optimal structural materials for thermonuclear reactor elements in contact with hot plasma.
The GOL-3 installation is a solenoid on which many coils (110 pieces) are placed, creating a powerful magnetic field inside the tube. Before operating the installation, vacuum pumps Air is pumped out of the tube, after which deuterium atoms are injected inside. Then, the contents of the tube must be heated to tens of millions of degrees, passing a beam of charged particles.
Heating occurs in two stages - thanks to electric charge Preliminary heating to 20 thousand degrees is achieved, and then by “injecting” a beam of electrons, heating occurs to 50-60 million degrees. In this state, the plasma is held for only a fraction of a second - during this time the instruments take readings for subsequent analysis.
All this time, voltage is applied to the coils, creating a magnetic field of about five tesla in them.
Such a strong field, obeying physical laws, tends to tear the coils apart, and to prevent this they are fastened with strong steel fastenings.
In total, there are several “shots” per day, consuming about 30 MW of electrical power for each. This energy comes from the Novosibirsk hydroelectric station through a separate network.
Installation of FEL in the Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion, adjacent to the BINP.
Free electron lasers consist of two units - an undulator and an optical resonator.
The idea is this: a beam of electrons flies through a section with an alternating magnetic field. Under the influence of this field, electrons are forced to fly not in a straight line, but along a certain sinusoidal, wave-like trajectory. Performing this wobbling motion, relativistic electrons emit light, which falls in a straight line into an optical resonator, inside of which there is a crazy vacuum (10–10 millimeters of mercury).
At opposite ends of the pipe there are two massive copper mirrors. On the way from mirror to mirror and back, the light gains decent power, part of which is output to the consumer. The electrons that have given up energy into electromagnetic radiation are turned around through a system of bending magnets, returned to the RF resonators and decelerated there.
User stations, of which there are six today, are located on the second floor of the building outside the accelerator hall, where you cannot be present during the operation of the FEL. The radiation is conveyed upward through pipes filled with dry nitrogen.
In particular, the radiation from this installation was used by biologists to develop a new method for studying complex molecular systems.
Chemists now have the opportunity to control reactions in a very energy-efficient manner. Physicists are studying metamaterials - artificial materials, which have a negative refractive index in a certain wavelength range, becoming completely invisible, etc.
As you can see from the “door”, the building probably has a 100-fold safety margin for radiation protection.
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