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Physics, controls conference this week in Santa Fe

More than 100 engineers and researchers from all over the world will be in Santa Fe Wednesday to attend a meeting hosted by the Laboratory on control systems for accelerators and other large and complex experimental facilities.

Accelerator Controls, Automation and Computer Networking (LANSCE-8) will host the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) Collaboration Meeting in La Fonda Hotel. Among those registered for the meeting are technical experts from the US, UK, South Korea, China, Italy, France, Australia, Canada and Chile. The conference runs through Friday.

The EPICS control system toolkit, developed by LANSCE-8 in the mid 1980s for the Strategic Defense Initiative, is used by more than 100 sites worldwide.

EPICS has become the de facto standard for high-energy physics facilities - such as the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory, the Berlin Synchrotron project or BESSY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron , or DESY, the Paul Scherrer Institute near Geneva, the Japan Proton Accelerator, or JPARC, the Japan High-Energy Facility, or KEK - as well as for such major astronomy facilities as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and the Gemini and Keck observatories in Hawaii, as well as other large experimental facilities.

EPICS also has been adopted by the largest U.S. science project currently under construction, the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Among key speakers at the meeting are LANSCE Division Leader Paul Lisowski, as well as representatives from the SNS, the Diamond Synchrotron at Oxfordshire, United Kingdom and the Australian Synchrotron Project, all currently under development.

Information about the meeting is available at http://lansce.lanl.gov/EPICS/ online.

-- Jim Danneskiold

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