The First Phase of the CANDLE Project Is Complete
On July 22, the formal ceremony of opening AREAL (AREAL-Advanced Research Electron Accelerator Laboratory) scientific research linear accelerator was held at the CANDLE Synchrotron Research Institute.
Vasily Tsakanov, the CANDLE project leader, made the opening speech, and the opening ceremony was entrusted to the Chairman of the RA MES State Committee of Science, Samvel Harutyunyan and the official representative of German accelerator centre DESY, W. Decking. In their opening remarks, they presented the establishment history of AREAL accelerator, its scientific significance, and their expectations towards increasing the productivity of Armenian scientists’ work. A video about launching the accelerator was also shown.
The Chairman of the SCS, S. Harutyunyan noted that the project of building a scientific research linear accelerator was formed in 2011, as a result of discussions with international experts. At that time, a phased implementation of the CANDLE project was proposed – a realisation of a project, relatively small, having its own scientific value, in comply with modern trends of accelerator physics development and developing perspective directions of experimental research.
As the Chairman of the SCS, S. Harutyunyan said in his opening speech, the AREAL project does not have its equivalent in the whole region. AREAL will allow to receive ultra-short electron bunch impulses, which is one of the perspective spheres of modern beam physics and accelerator technology and is one of the priority directions for many of the world’s leading centres. It will allow carrying out modern experimental research towards accelerator technologies, coherent radiation sources and research of fast process dynamics and will have an important scientific and practical significance for advanced experimental studies in the areas of Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Materials Science.
As a result of building AREAL accelerator, a modern scientific research laboratory of electron accelerators and their application will be created inArmenia, a staff of scientists and engineers, ready for building CANDLE main accelerator will be formed, and technical solutions to CANDLE main accelerator systems will be tested.
AREAL project was implemented in close cooperation with German DESY and Swiss PSI accelerator centres. Russian, Chinese, American, French, and Italian researchers made major consulting services to the project.
Through the efforts of RA MES State Committee of Science and “CANDLE” centre, in 2010-2014, official talks were held and cooperation memoranda were signed with the French Department of Atomic Energy, Germany’s DESY Accelerator Centre, Swiss National Accelerator Centre, Russian National Centre “Kurchatov Institute”, Italian ELETTRA Accelerator Centre, and China’s Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics (SINAP).
Currently, the tests of the main systems of AREAL accelerator are successfully complete; on December 20, 2013, AREAL first beam was obtained, and the final operation is scheduled for November, 2014. In September, 2013, efforts to create a specialised experimental laboratory of DELTA ultrahigh-speed processes based on AREAL laser system were launched.
The main part of AREAL accelerator cost (25 million Euros) was provided by large European research centres, DESY and PSI in particular. Our state allocated the rest of the amount (350 million AMD). Already 30 young scientists have trained in those foreign centres.
This May, the State Committee of Science announced a competition of scientific topic applications, 5 scholarly subjects selected as a result will be realised on AREAL linear accelerator.