One of the most important aspects of scientific research at laboratories such as the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility is exploring new and exciting future projects that may be conducted at the laboratory. These projects should be of great importance to the scientific community, and should represent the frontiers of current scientific understanding and/or technology. The faculty and scientists at the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility are committed to searching for these new avenues of research and to develop novel experiments for investigating these areas. The purpose of this page is to describe some of our new future projects.
Compact Electron and Photon Source (CELPHOS)
The IUCF has recently begun a joint collaboration with Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center to develop an accelerator which will serve the Department of Defense's requirements for testing radiation effects, as well as, IU's interest in a compact high-brightness x-ray source. This dual-function accelerator will be composed of two parts: 1) an injector which is an existing Crane linear accelerator that is capable of producing electron energies of up to 60 MeV and 2) a 20 m electron storage ring. The dipole magnets that will be used in the storage ring were previously used in the Cooler Injector Synchrotron (CIS) experiment at the IUCF.
When operating as an X-ray source, the storage ring will form electron bunches approximately 10 ps in length that will collide with a laser pulse with approximately ~ 1 micron wavelength (near infrared-visible range). The collision between the electron beam and the laser beam will produce photons through the Inverse Compton Scattering process, with energies far greater than the laser beam. For a 50 MeV beam, it is possible to produce photon wavelengths ~ 0.03 nm (hard X-ray).
CELPHOS would serve as a user facility for the IU community in a variety of scientific research areas. X-ray and VUV sources are of great importance to the scientific community for probing the structure and properties of biological and condensed matter systems. Small labs which conduct research in these areas typically utilize a rotating anode, which is a compact X-ray source. One of the drawbacks of the rotating anode is that it has a relatively low X-ray flux, which ultimately limits the quality of experiments that can be conducted. One of the great advantages of CELPHOS is that it is possible to produce X-ray fluxes which are a factor of 10,000 times greater than the rotating anode.
The CELPHOS accelerator would be an exciting new component to the IUCF which would jointly serve the needs of the Navy and the IU community.
FINeSSE
The FIne-grained Neutrino Scattering Scintillator Experiment, a 10 ton detector located at a near location in a low energy, high intensity neutrino beam is designed to measure the strange quark contribution to the nucleon spin. In addition, FINeSSE will investigate neutrino-nucleon charged-current quasielastic and neutral-current elastic scattering, charged- and neutral-current pion-production reactions, and neutrino-electron elastic scattering cross sections.
This detector will complement the existing short baseline neutrino oscillation programs by measuring these cross sections and providing a better understanding of these low energy neutrino sources.
