Los Alamos researcher receives accelerator technology award

Contact: David Lyons, davidlyons@lanl.gov, (505) 665-9198

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 19, 2001 -- Los Alamos researcher Lloyd Young has been awarded the 2001 Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Award. Young accepted the award at the recent Particle Accelerator Conference in Chicago, sponsored by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society.

The award is given every two years to two individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the development of particle accelerator science and technology.
Young, a researcher at Los Alamos since 1979, said that he was excited to have received the prestigious award.

"It was a real honor for me to be recognized by the IEEE NPSS and to be included in the company of the other winners, past and present," said Young. A statement from the IEEE NPSS said that Young received the award for "his invention, development, and beam line operation of the resonantly-coupled radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) structure and the methods used to tune it and other RFQ structures."

An RFQ structure is used in particle accelerators to efficiently capture a low-energy, continuous beam of ions emitted from an ion source, bunch this beam at the radio frequency and accelerate it to a sufficiently high energy to enable it to be accelerated by a follow-on structure, usually a drift-tube linear accelerator. Young's RFQ work was primarily focused on the design, tuning and testing of the Low-Energy Demonstration Accelerator for the Accelerator Production of Tritium Project. The APT project is now part of Advanced Accelerator Applications project.

Bill Press, deputy Laboratory director for Science, Technology and Programs, said, "The Laboratory is extremely proud of Lloyd's outstanding efforts in accelerator research. His work continues to have a major impact on accelerators around the world."

Young's innovation was to design and construct an eight-meter-long RFQ in four separately tuned, closely coupled two-meter segments. Young's design with four segments is inherently much more stable than is a typical single-segment RFQ cavity. The stability of Young's design facilitates gentle focusing and bunching, while providing high output-beam energy. Young's design enables a subsequent linear accelerator to work at a higher, more efficient, frequency while accelerating the beam to higher energy with minimal beam losses.

The LEDA RFQ that Young worked on is able to accelerate a 100-milliAmpere proton beam continuous wave (CW) to 6.7 MeV in an eight-meter RFQ accelerator. The CW-100-mA proton beam at 6.7 MeV was a requirement for the APT project. The high current of 100 mA was needed to produce enough tritium to supply the nation's defense needs and the high energy, 6.7 million electron volts, was required by the follow-on structure, a coupled cavity drift-tube-linac. Young's RFQ is appropriate for many applications, including medical isotope production and the transmutation of nuclear waste.

Young also was lauded for other advances including a simple means for tuning RFQ accelerators that is used by accelerator laboratories all over the world.

Young currently is doing research for the Spallation Neutron Source Project. Don Rej, division director for SNS at Los Alamos, said, "Lloyd continues to make equally impressive contributions in his current assignment which includes designing and commissioning of the 1-GeV linear accelerator for SNS. The SNS team is grateful to Lloyd for developing a workable superconducting accelerator design and commissioning scheme."

Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.